The AS Judiciary dismissed a libel suit against the newly elected Associated Students, Inc. Vice President Christopher Chavez late Tuesday afternoon.
Vice presidential election runner-up Jason Aula, who is also president of the Conservative Student Union, filed a lawsuit last Thursday in response to comments made by a Chavez campaign worker on April 25.
The worker, former ASI Sen. Guido D’Onofrio, posted on a MySpace forum the comments labelled Aula as a “known Internet troll” and suggested that he may be mentally unstable.
D’Onofrio also called on Chavez supporters to unite against Aula in “a fight for free and good government against the forces of idiocy and incompetence.”
Aula said he believed his chances in the run-off election were affected by this “malicious act,” according to the official AS Judiciary report of the case.
The AS Judiciary acquitted Chavez of all accusations, given that he had written on the MySpace forum that he disagreed with the comments of his campaign worker.
“I asked supporters to be civil and that the level of discourse needed to be much higher,” Chavez told the Daily Forty-Niner. “I wrote that these comments were not a reflection of my campaign and condemned them. … I actually threatened to fire Guido over the weekend if he did that again.”
The AS Judiciary also found that Chavez’s innocence stems from the fact that he did not sign the Clean Campaign Pledge, which states that candidates shall “not use or permit the use of character defamation, whispering campaigns, libel, slander, or scurrilous attacks on any candidate or his or her personal or family life.”
Aula’s belief was that Chavez had signed the pledge and therefore violated the document’s standards, yet AS Secretary Dianna Reyes confirmed that Chavez never signed the voluntary pledge.
The AS Judiciary ruled that Chavez’s decision not to sign the form meant that D’Onofrio’s comments could not be seen as libelous and could only be viewed as D’Onofrio’s own opinion. Chavez, having publicly dissociated himself from the comments, could then not be held accountable for them.
“Every other ASI executive signed the Clean Campaign Pledge, and when I asked to see it, they told me that it was unavailable,” Aula said. “I think it was a bit unethical and immoral that the form wasn’t made available to me.”
Aula also told the Daily Forty-Niner that he would continue to pursue legal action against Chavez, which he said meant going to the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“I won’t stand for ASI not enforcing the rules… they are the ones that should be upholding ethics and enforcing the rules and they’re not,” Aula said. “I want to take out a literal lawsuit against ASI and Chavez in an outside court and get proper representation.”
The AS Judiciary also concluded that should the Senate seek to pass “a more comprehensive campaign regulation policy,” and that online social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube be “banned from campaign use by candidates and their staff.”