BLACKHEART Cleveland

Yesterday, the parties settled out of court in James Renner’s wrongful termination suit.  You’ll recall that Renner did a story on how Kevin Coughlin fucks everything in sight except his wife, that Coughlin threatened to sue, Scene and the parent company Times Shamrock caved, spiked the story, Renner complained, and got fired.

Well, that’s one sexytime deposition that won’t be happening….boo!  Kevin Coughlin appears to be doing a victory lap over at the Beacon Journal,

”From the beginning, I have argued that the plaintiff’s action was a stunt to gain publicity for his false and scurrilous allegations,” he said in an e-mailed statement. ”I am pleased that this abuse of the courts has come to an end.”

That’s what douchebags do when they don’t have to sit under oath regarding the whereabouts of their penis.  Renner’s attorney just sent out a statement that says in part.

I find the Senator’s ‘victory lap’ rather comical.  Hopefully, his lawyer will inform him that the Senator is essentially starting his end zone celebration before he crossed the goal line because our dismissal notice reserved the right to re-file our claim if we so choose.

“If Senator Coughlin has had a change of heart, and now is finally willing to back up his public allegations that my client’s story defames him, we look forward to his suit and getting the opportunity to finally conduct his deposition.

This is quite the epic fail for Couglin, true.  But the bigger loser here is Times Shamrock, Scene Magazine, Scene Editor Frank Lewis, and Scene Publisher Matt Fabyan.  They caved.  Again.  I know these guys, there is no way this thing would settle if it weren’t the Scene crowd caving.  None.  Doesn’t matter how much they coughed up, but cough it up they surely did.

So essentially what Scene did was (a) ruin their journalistic credibility by spiking a story about an elected official (b) in response to threats of litigation that were never going to happen, (c) fired their best reporter, (d) ended up paying TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS in legal bills they wanted to avoid in the first place, and finally, (e) the coup de grace of FAIL, they end up paying this reporter to essentially start a competitor.

Really quite astounding when you think about it.  Congratulations Frank, you win the award for most counterproductive, self destructive 8 months in the history of Cleveland journalism.