Senate Avoids Paying Schmitz’s Tab

With some eleventh-hour maneuvering, the state Senate on Thursday escaped a court order requiring it to pay $20,000 on behalf of former state Sen. John G. Schmitz to settle a $10-million libel lawsuit brought by feminist attorney Gloria Allred.

Superior Court Judge Leon Savitch reversed his own July ruling ordering the Senate Rules Committee to pay the $20,000, acknowledging that the legislative body could not be forced to pay because it was not technically a party to the lawsuit.

As a result, Schmitz may have to pay the entire amount out of his own pocket and the litigation, already five years old, will likely continue well into the new year.

The ruling was welcomed by Allan Browne, the attorney representing the state Senate, who told reporters outside the courtroom, “I don’t think the Legislature should be required to pay for his (Schmitz’s) reckless comments.”

Allred also hailed the ruling calling it a “complete victory. . . . From the beginning I’ve been saying the taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay” for Schmitz’s caustic 1981 press release which referred to her as a “slick butch lawyeress.”

But in winning dismissal of the court order against it, the Senate may have reopened the case by spoiling the 1986 settlement agreement, in which ultra-conservative Schmitz apologized to Allred.

Donald Ruston, an Orange County attorney representing Schmitz, said: “You can’t just release one party from a contract and expect the remaining party to pay up. If you do that, the whole thing is a no-go.” Ruston said Schmitz agreed to the settlement because it was understood that the Senate would pay the $20,000.

Now that the state has been extricated from the case, Ruston said, “it’s no deal. That’s not the agreement, that’s not the contract.”

The judge in his ruling also said that it was well understood by all parties that the Senate stood ready to pay the settlement. Legislative lawyers for the Senate Rules Committee were kept consistently apprised of the settlement negotiations.

But once the agreement was signed, Allred began efforts to convince the Rules Committee not to pay any of the money. After a series of hearings at the Capitol, the committee was locked in a 2-2 vote that effectively killed any chance of the legislative body paying the money for Schmitz.

But the issue is far from settled.

Ruston indicated on Thursday that Schmitz may try to get $20,000 from the Senate. “They have been released (from the case) . . . but at what cost?” Ruston asked.

Indeed, while the state Senate may have saved $20,000 by its victory on Thursday, the case has cost the state much more in legal fees alone, and the bill will likely be run still higher as a result of Thursday’s action.

The Senate has paid more than $30,000 to lawyers defending Schmitz, who retired from the Legislature 1982 in an unsuccessful bid to run for the U.S. Senate, and will continue to pay his legal bills in this case, said Cliff Berg, executive director of the Rules Committee.

Schmitz was stripped of three committee chairmanships and his actions were publicly “deplored” by the Senate. His run for a U.S. Senate seat crumbled in 1982 when it was revealed in court documents that he had fathered two children in an extramarital affair.

Schmitz, a former director of the John Birch Society, now teaches at Rancho Santiago College in Orange. He could not be reached Thursday to comment on the court ruling.