Ex-Wife Can’t ‘Bad-Mouth’ GOP Official

State Republican Party Chairman Michael J. Schroeder cannot prevent his ex-wife from making politically disparaging remarks about him to his political colleagues, a state appeals court has ruled.

But she cannot “bad-mouth” him to his business associates--except if her comments involve politics, according to Presiding Justice David Sills of the 4th District Court of Appeal.

Sills was a member of a three-judge panel considering an appeal by Schroeder’s former wife, Kathleen, who said she was virtually precluded from saying anything negative about her ex-husband by the judge presiding over the couple’s divorce trial.

The couple, who are both lawyers, separated in 1991 and divorced two years later.

Under a judgment by Superior Court Judge James H. Poole, Schroeder received the family business, National Chiropractic Council, an insurance-buying group that helps provide malpractice coverage for chiropractors. He was ordered to pay his wife for her share of the business.

After dividing the couple’s property, Poole ordered both parties to be “permanently . . . restrained from uttering disparaging or derogatory remarks to or about the other in the presence of the parties’ business accounts, suppliers, employees, business associates, political associates or tenants.”

Majorie G. Fuller, an attorney for Kathleen Schroeder, said her former husband specifically asked for that order.

Kathleen Schroeder appealed, saying the order infringed on her right to free speech.

The court agreed with her, but only as it affected her right to make statements of a political nature.

“Political and ideological speech lies at the very core of freedom of speech protected by the state and federal constitutions,” Sills wrote.

But Sills said the court had to affirm Poole’s ruling precluding Kathleen from castigating her ex-husband to his business associates--even though the panel had serious problems with “prior restraints on speech.”

One factor that weighed heavily in the ex-husband’s favor was that Kathleen filed what is known as a “judgment roll” appeal--where the record consists of no transcripts but only certain essential papers filed with the trial court.

Such an appeal is “almost impossible to win,” Sills noted, because the appellate panel had to assume that substantial evidence supported Poole’s judgment.

Schroeder said Monday that the panel was correct.

He said even though he and his ex-wife separated six years ago “neither one of us has disparaged the other one, so the court’s ruling was . . . largely academic.”

But Fuller, his ex-wife’s attorney, said she was disappointed with the panel’s decision.

Under the ruling “my client is precluded from saying, ‘My ex-husband has a bad haircut,’ ” Fuller said. “It’s just not a correct interpretation of the Constitution.”