Suspended Chico State professor David Stachura’s failed effort to sue a colleague for libel has hit him in the wallet.
A Superior Court judge has ordered Stachura to pay the California State University system more than $64,000 it spent to defend a lecturer he sued after she said at a campuswide forum nearly a year ago that Stachura threatened to shoot up the biology department. The university indemnified the lecturer, Betsey Tamietti.
Judge Stephen Benson threw out the suit in July under a California statute that allows successful defendants to recoup the cost of beating back such litigation. He issued the fee order late last month. Stachura also sued his estranged wife for libel but withdrew the suit.
“As a public institution, we must be responsible stewards of the money allocated to us by the state of California,” Chico State spokesperson Andrew Staples said in an email. The school looks “forward to recovering the attorney’s fees the university was forced to incur to fight this lawsuit that the court agreed was without merit and would have chilled free speech.”
Stachura’s lawyer, Kasra Parsad, didn’t respond to a request to comment on the ruling.
David Loy, legal director of the San Rafael-based First Amendment Coalition, said the law worked as intended in the Stachura case. “It protects those who speak out on matters of public concern from being intimidated by frivolous and costly lawsuits,” he said. It allows defendants to quickly beat back bogus suits meant to intimidate critics without years of costly litigation. In libel cases, “the process itself is the punishment,” Loy said.
The lecturer’s remarks came days after EdSource reported that Stachura’s estranged wife said in court documents in the couple’s divorce case that he threatened to kill two colleagues who cooperated in a university investigation that found Stachura had an inappropriate affair with a graduate student that included sex in his office.
A different judge in August granted Chico State a three-year workplace violence restraining order against Stachura. It requires him to stay off campus and away from Tamietti and others, including the professors who reported his affair with the student.
Stachura was put on paid suspension in December, a status that continues, Staples said. An investigation of the threats against the co-workers and other matters “is complete and has moved to the next stage of the personnel process,” he said.
The CSU chancellor’s office in Long Beach is overseeing an outside investigation of how the Chico State administration handled the Stachura affair, including the original investigation of the sex case and the gun threats. It is expected to be concluded in a month or two, Amy Bentley-Smith, a spokesperson, said in an email. Stachura received light punishment in the sex case and was later named the school’s ‘”outstanding professor” of the 2020-2021 academic year.
During hearings in the restraining order case, Shanna McDaniel, a deputy state attorney general, said that the fact Stachura was likely to lose the libel case and be hit with the type of fee motion that Benson approved made him even more dangerous and a greater threat to the campus community.
In a written declaration in the libel case, Stachura said he’s suffered financially over the last year, losing consulting jobs he had for several companies. He is now listed as the founder and chief executive of a company called Philanthropic Pharma, according to its website. He is listed as its only employee.