$25,000 Libel Judgment : Freethinker Foes Think Very Little of Each Other

As libel lawsuits go, the case of Mike McHugh vs. Frank Mortynis far from the cutting edge of the legal frontier. In the balance are none of the constitutional issues often at stake in these battles, such as freedom of the press and the right to privacy.

No, this is just a mean and nasty, toe-to-toe fight between two strong-willed antagonists and rival freethinkers, both well known in the San Diego humanist community.

So far, McHugh, a 67-year-old Spring Valley man who makes custom jewelry, is winning. A Superior Court judge in April granted him a $25,000 judgment after a two-hour non-jury trial that Mortyn says he never knew about and never attended.

No Intention of Paying

Mortyn is acting as his own attorney--though for a while it appeared his attorney of record was his friend Floyd Morrow, the former San Diego City Council member who ran second in last year’s mayoral race against Maureen O’Connor. At a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, Mortyn will attempt to overturn the judgment. Even if he fails, he says, he has no intention of ever paying McHugh a cent, let alone $25,000.

“I won’t capitulate to something unjust and against my own conscious and better judgment,” said an indignant Mortyn, a semi-retired college physics teacher. “I absolutely would not pay it.”

McHugh calls Mortyn a coward and a bully who attempts to get his way through intimidation.

The focus of the libel suit is a letter Mortyn mailed to about two dozen of McHugh’s neighbors in which, with sharp sarcasm, he urged them to help McHugh “muster the courage to stand up (and) speak out” at a February, 1988, humanists forum on the pros and cons of circumcision.

The four-paragraph letter mentions McHugh’s past “behavior problems” and implies he had a mental problem. For McHugh, it was too much.

“I went to my attorney because I felt he’d gone over the edge,” McHugh said.

The letter, though, was but one brick thrown in an ongoing dispute between the two men that dates back at least to March, 1986.

The two can’t even agree on what started it all. Mortyn says it has to do with circumcision. For the past several years, Mortyn has launched a crusade against the surgical procedure, both through forums and his Abolition Update newsletter. He calls circumcision “genital mutilation.”

“I believe it should be abolished. . . . It’s not justifiable in a modern world,” Mortyn said, because it inflicts needless violence and pain on children in the name of what he called “religious superstition.”

Subject Distasteful

Mortyn says he has worked to bring the issue before the public, even though people find the subject distasteful. “It’s something not usually talked about. Now people know it is an issue,” he said.

According to Mortyn, McHugh was among those who wanted to silence him. He claims that at humanist

discussion group meetings, McHugh insisted that he stop talking about circumcision, urgings he claims were at times accompanied with insults and physical threats. Mortyn says he responded by doing things that “basically . . . presses his buttons.”

The point of the letter, for example, “was to get him to the meeting and provoke him,” Mortyn said.

McHugh says it is Mortyn’s penchant for attacking people through “poison pen” letters that is at the heart of their feud. McHugh says he came to the defense of two humanist friends--one of whom is an atheist who has sued the city of San Diego to remove the cross on top of Mt. Soledad--whom Mortyn lambasted in letters and at humanist group discussions held at First Unitarian Church.

“I then became the new target of his attacks,” says McHugh, adding that neither he nor his supporters have insulted or threatened Mortyn. “I think this has frustrated the hell out of him because I wouldn’t respond.”

As for circumcision, McHugh says he’s never publicly taken a stand on the issue or debated it with Mortyn.

“I’ve never expressed an opinion about it,” he said. “I’m against theological surgery. . . . I think that’s nonsense.”

But he said he could be convinced that there are medical reasons for circumcision, and that, were he faced with the choice today, would again have his two sons circumcised.

Unable to resist a humorous dig at his opponent, McHugh says of Mortyn: “He’s in the forefront of the movement to abolish circumcision. You can say he’s right at the tip of the movement.”

Rival Humanist Groups

The real point of the lawsuit, McHugh says, has nothing to do with the surgery. “My purpose is to put a stop to (his) kind of attacks.”

“He’s good at winning by intimidation,” McHugh said. “If that continues, we’ll end up with (intimidators) running things.”

A backdrop to the lawsuit is the apparent tension between their two rival humanist groups. McHugh is president of the Humanist Assn. of San Diego, while Mortyn is a member of the newer Humanist Fellowship of San Diego. Both Mortyn and McHugh are freethinkers, who don’t believe in life after death or in the supernatural.

Mortyn claims there is another subtle element to this backdrop. He says he is aligned with a group of humanists, atheists and freethinkers who are in control of a multimillion-dollar estate left by James Hervey Johnson, an old and cantankerous San Diego atheist who died last year. Johnson left about $15 million to be used to promote atheism and other causes. A group of atheists, led by Madalyn Murray O’Hair of Texas, has lodged a court fight to wrest control of the Johnson estate.

McHugh says that while he knew Johnson--describing him a “mean, bitter old man”--he is not involved in the fight over his estate and that any attempt to say he is is a figment of Mortyn’s creation. McHugh’s lawyer in the libel suit is Georgine Brave, the same San Diego attorney who is representing O’Hair in her lawsuit against Johnson’s estate in probate court.

Mortyn doesn’t have a lawyer defending him against McHugh, although that was unclear for many months.

Luncheon Potluck Discussions

Mortyn is a friend of attorney Floyd Morrow, a well-known San Diegan who served on the City Council for several years. He recently announced that he will run again for the council.

The two, who meet regularly over what Morrow describes as a weekly potluck lunch gathering at his office, apparently talked about the case. Initial documents filed on Mortyn’s behalf in the case were from Morrow’s office and carried his signature.

At one point, Mortyn took the unusual step of writing directly to the Municipal Court judge, Robert C. Coates, pleading, “If you can offer some suggestions to Floyd (Morrow), please call him and give him whatever proposals you may see as a way out of this mess.”

Morrow says it was all a mistake, and that he has never represented Mortyn in the case and has written to the court to say so. Morrow says that Mortyn apparently used the services of a paralegal in his office, who drafted the legal documents on the office computer. The documents went out erroneously with his letterhead and his signature, Morrow said.

When Morrow found out he was listed as the attorney of record in court, “I literally got him (Mortyn) by the scruff of the neck” and straightened things out, he said.

Says Mortyn: “Floyd has never represented me, but I consult with him as a friend.”

Restraining Order Included

Among the documents Mortyn has filed in court is one especially nasty diatribe against McHugh that accuses him of being “a fundamentally insecure person in need of continuous reinforcing approval from others, that this is . . . obvious in his apparent need to be always surrounded by numerous sycophantic admirers to whom he can look for admiration he needs at all times, that his fear of defendant (Mortyn) derives from the fact that defendant understands him and see through him and occasionally laughs at him.”

It is statements such as these that both McHugh and his attorney, Brave, are aiming to stop. Included in the judgment against Mortyn is a restraining order demanding he refrain from making libelous statements about McHugh, Brave said. If he doesn’t, Brave says, she will seek contempt of court charges against him.

So far, McHugh says, he’s spent about $2,000 in legal fees. “This is a painful and unpleasant situation for me,” said McHugh, a former merchant seaman for more than 10 years. “There are people who’ve asked me to drop it . . . but we never initiated this, he did.”

For some old-line freethinkers, the bitter dispute is appalling.

Jack Schebesta, president of the Humanist Assn. of San Diego in the late ‘70s, knows both men and is familiar with the suit. “This puts humanists in a bad light. This feuding and squabbling here . . . there aren’t enough humanists in multitudes to afford this. I’d rather see these gripes of humanists, these personality clashes, swept under the rug.”