Zell firm at odds with San Diego County official

SAN DIEGO -- —  A mobile home park company controlled by Sam Zell, chief executive of Tribune Co., is locked in a defamation lawsuit against a San Diego County supervisor who accused the company of rent-gouging elderly tenants and lying about making repairs.

The dispute began in 2002 when Supervisor Dianne Jacob made comments about the company to tenants and reporters, and to Zell in a letter.

The company, Equity LifeStyle Properties Inc., formerly known as Manufactured Home Communities, filed a lawsuit the next year, alleging that some of Jacob’s statements were false and defamatory.

A federal judge in San Diego dismissed the suit, the company appealed, and in early March the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the suit could go to trial on three of the statements.

According to the lawsuit, in those statements, Jacob said Equity LifeStyle Properties specialized in driving out elderly tenants and lied to the county government about making sewage repairs. The suit also alleges that she said the district attorney was interested in pursuing civil or criminal charges against the company.

In its court filings, the company denies those statements. Asked to comment on the case, Equity LifeStyle issued a statement: “An appeals court of the United States found that her statements may have gone too far. Litigation is still pending.”

In an essay that appeared this week on the San Diego news website Voice of San Diego, Jacob accused Zell of trying to silence her criticism of his company and said it was odd for a newspaper owner to try to stifle free speech. Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times as well as television stations in L.A. and San Diego.

“I am convinced that Zell is using our judicial system to bully me and intimidate those who dare question how [his company] treats its customers,” Jacob wrote in her essay titled “I Won’t Be Sued Into Silence.”

“I stand behind my three remarks about Mr. Zell’s company,” Jacob wrote.

Jacob criticized Zell and his company after her constituents, many of them elderly and on fixed incomes, complained to her about 25% rent increases at three parks in her district, which covers much of eastern San Diego County.

Equity LifeStyle owns more than 300 mobile home parks in 28 states and has been active in the fight to overturn rent-control ordinances. Zell is the chairman of the company, which is publicly traded.

The legal issue is whether Jacob’s comments were opinions, which cannot be the basis of a defamation suit, or meant as assertions of fact, which are subject to proof. In its 2-1 decision, the 9th Circuit ruled that jurors could conclude that Jacob was trying to convince the public that the three assertions were factual.

Jacob also criticized The Times for not publishing her essay. Nicholas Goldberg, editor of the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages, said he and his staff read Jacob’s essay closely before deciding not to publish it. He said the paper receives as many as 500 submissions a week and can publish only a handful.

“We recognize that we have a responsibility to cover Sam Zell when he makes news -- which we have done on the opinion pages and elsewhere in the paper,” Goldberg said. “But we also feel that we shouldn’t give him excessive coverage.

”. . . We asked ourselves whether we would publish this op-ed piece about a mobile-home-park owner’s battle with the county of San Diego if it was not about Sam Zell, and we decided we probably would not.”

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