Ex-Mayor’s Libel Suit Is Dismissed

A judge has thrown out a former mayor’s suit against the Miami Herald, saying that it is a columnist’s right to call a politician “loony.”

Florida Circuit Court Judge Amy Dean said that Carl Hiaasen’s characterizations of former Mayor Xavier Suarez as “loony,” “deranged” and “paranoid” in a December 1997 column were opinion and were not purported to be fact.

Dean, in a decision issued Thursday, also dismissed Suarez’s allegations against former Herald political editor Tom Fiedler. He had written that Suarez “likened the state’s control over [Miami] to the Nazi takeover of France in World War II.” Suarez said he never made such a comment. Dean said Fiedler was offering “rhetorical hyperbole.”

Suarez, who was mayor through most of the 1980s, filed the suit earlier this year shortly after the Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing fraud in the 1997 municipal election that returned him to office. The scandal led to Suarez’s ouster as mayor by a state appeals court.