In a federal court filing Wednesday, former Patrolman and Haverhill School Committee member Scott W. Wood Jr. pushed back against the Town of Wenham’s attempts to dismiss his lawsuit, arguing that a Wenham police official defamed him and violated his privacy in sharing allegedly false information with the news media.
Wood’s lawyer, Sean R. Cronin of Boston, also argued “negative comments” about former Mayor James J. Fiorentini captured by the FBI during an unrelated investigation is political activity protected by the first amendment.
Cronin was responding to a Feb. 7 court filing from Wenham, which also ended Wood’s work as a town police officer. Wood filed suit last October for breach of contract, privacy violations, business interference and defamation on the part of someone he speculates is Wenham Police Chief Kevin J. DiNapoli, as well as current and former Haverhill police chiefs. Wood alleges, because Haverhill failed to destroy a 2013 background check as agreed, he says information he alleges is false became the basis for wrongful termination and damage to his reputation. Neither Wood nor his lawyer have been asked by the court to provide, or volunteered, evidence proving information from Haverhill’s background checks are false. WHAV emailed Cronin for comment which was not received in time for this report.
Continuing to allege DiNapoli knew the information from Haverhill’s background checks contained false information, Cronin argues laws protecting public officials from defamation suits should not apply to the responsible public official. “As pled, the statements made by the Town of Wenham employee to the Boston Globe, were made knowing that they were false, and knowing that they were harmful to Officer Wood,” Cronin wrote.
Moreover, Cronin argued that Wenham did not verify the information from the 2013 report before terminating Wood. Only after his termination did they begin conducting an internal affairs investigation. The background checks were made public when shared with the Essex County District Attorney’s office.
Cronin also contested Wenham’s argument that the police department did not need to follow civil service procedure after not renewing his contract in June 2023. According to Cronin, the department failed to give Wood either proper notice, a hearing, or right to counsel.
“As established in Town’s policy Officer Wood had a right to counsel, but despite this right the town chose to retaliate against Officer Wood by terminating him as soon as he hired counsel,” Cronin wrote in the brief.
On top of being defamed and deprived of civil service procedure, Cronin maintained that Wood’s first, fourth and fourteenth amendments were violated. Not only was the disclosure of Wood’s instant messages, which were obtained through an unrelated FBI criminal investigation, a violation of the fourth amendment, but he argued that the messages included political speech protected under the first amendment. “Specifically, the unverified comments related to negative comments about the mayor of the City of Haverhill contained in those messages.”
As WHAV reported last June, those comments come from a Jan. 26, 2013 background check by since-retired Deputy Police Chief Donald Thompson. Thompson’s report alleges Wood’s “unprofessional and problematic behavior” including sending text messages, shared by a Massachusetts state trooper and an FBI Agent from an unrelated case, calling Fiorentini a “Nigga Lover” and “Ass Monkey.” The follow-up on Thompson’s report by Haverhill Police Capt. Meaghan Paré, dated Feb. 15, 2022 also references Wood calling the mayor a “no good piece of monkey…”
For the fourteenth amendment charge, he argued that Wenham depriving Wood of proper civil service procedure violated his right to due process. Cronin asks the judge to determine that the defendants “conspired to deprive the Plaintiff of the above-mentioned rights.”
U.S. District Court Judge Julia E. Kobick is to decide whether to grant Haverhill’s and/or Wenham’s efforts to dismiss Wood’s lawsuit.