A Bar Harbor man who sued police after he was arrested at a protest outside conservative legal activist Leonard Leo’s home on Mount Desert Island received $62,500 in a settlement with the officers who handcuffed him and took him to jail.
Eli Durand-McDonnell was arrested as he and others were protesting in Northeast Harbor in July 2022 over Leo’s influence in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn federal protections that made abortion legal.
The members of the Mount Desert Police Department who made the arrest were Lt. Kevin Edgecomb and Officer Nathan Formby.
The Bangor Daily News obtained a copy of the settlement through a request under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act to Mount Desert.
Aside from the dollar amount, which is being paid to Durand-McDonnell through the town’s insurer, the four page settlement includes standard provisions such as a release of Mount Desert and its representatives from further legal claims and a prohibition against either party in the suit from publicly disparaging the other.
Durand-McDonnell and his attorney Matthew Morgan did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment.
Leo was critical of the settlement.
“Getting more than one and a half times Maine’s per capita income for harassing and verbally assaulting a young girl and her parents while walking down a public street, and then waiting for them outside their home,” he said. “Nice work if you can get it.”
When he was arrested on July 31, 2022, Durand-McDonnell, 25, was charged with disorderly conduct, but Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger later dismissed the misdemeanor charge.
Granger characterized the case as a low priority for his office and said prosecutors should “tread very carefully” when considering whether protected political speech crosses the line into a breach of the peace.
Two months later, Durand-McDonnell sued Edgecomb and Formby in federal court, alleging that they violated his rights to free speech and arrested him under false pretenses.
The day of his arrest, Durand-McDonnell was accused of cursing at Leo and his family as they walked down Main Street in Northeast Harbor. Later that afternoon, Durand-McDonnell joined protests outside Leo’s home of his work to get conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. Such protests intensified that summer after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. v. Wade.
After Leo complained to police about getting yelled at by Durand-McDonnell, officers located and arrested him on the disorderly conduct charge. A criminal complaint accused him of knowingly accosting Leo and yelling obscenities and making offensive gestures at his family. Leo later said that Durand-McDonnell had cursed at his 11-year-old daughter, but the protester said his comments had been directed at Leo.
Durand-McDonnell was released on bail later that evening from Hancock County Jail, with conditions that he not have contact with Leo. However, the bail conditions made no mention of the conservative activist’s family.
Morgan later filed a motion to dismiss the charge on the grounds that it violated his client’s right to peacefully protest, arguing the allegations were insufficient and that he never should have been arrested.
Scrutiny and criticism of Leo has been a national issue.
As co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society, Leo spearheaded lobbying campaigns to have John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was described in a 2019 Washington Post story as “the maestro of a network of interlocking nonprofits working on media campaigns and other initiatives to sway lawmakers by generating public support for conservative judges.”
He has come under fire in recent years for directing nearly $100,000 in secret payments to Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for supposed consulting work. He also has leveraged his work with The Federalist Society — whose nonprofit tax status prohibits it from political advocacy — to obtain a $1.6 billion gift for his “dark money network” that has helped steer the federal judiciary to the right.
Last month, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Leo in an attempt to examine what Democrats called “an ethics crisis plaguing the Supreme Court. But Leo has refused to comply, calling the subpoena “unlawful and politically motivated.”