Last year, I was threatened by Stephanie Neely, who attempted to sue over articles I wrote for the FOP newsletter. Apparently, I'm doing my job too well.

The story was covered by the NY Times, written by Dan Mihalopoulos.

City Treasurer Threatens Defamation Suit Over Policeman’s Articles

By DAN MIHALOPOULOS

Mayor Richard M. Daley grudgingly bears the news media’s tendency to “scrooten” him constantly. Stephanie D. Neely, the first-term city treasurer, is taking a different approach to dealing with scrutiny from at least one pen-wielding critic. She retained a lawyer and is threatening a defamation suit against a Chicago police officer who repeatedly criticized her in the F.O.P. News, a union newsletter published by the local Fraternal Order of Police.

In the articles, Michael K. Shields wrote that Ms. Neely, acting as a member of the police pension board, cast votes that favored pension fund managers who contributed to her campaign. Her assertion that the articles entitle her to “substantial damages” from Mr. Shields and the union has not deterred Mr. Shields. State records confirm the donations from fund managers to Ms. Neely’s campaign.

“It seems that if you accept campaign cash in Chicago, that’s just business,” wrote Mr. Shields, the elected board trustee for patrolmen and detectives at the Chicago Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund. “If you speak out against it, that’s libel!”

As treasurer, Ms. Neely, 46, sits on the police pension fund’s eight-member board and on the boards of other city employee funds. Mr. Shields, 32, first used his “Pension News” column in the May 2009 newsletter to criticize her after she and the other fund trustees voted him down and refused to answer a subpoena from the office of the city’s inspector general. The investigators sought documents about the deals between city pension funds and DV Urban Realty Partners, a company that included the mayor’s nephew Robert G. Vanecko.

Writing about how the city’s representatives on the board had opposed complying with the subpoena, Mr. Shields pointed out that Ms. Neely received a campaign contribution from the realty company. In the November newsletter, he continued to question her for opposing his efforts to get another pension fund money manager fired.

“This shakedown for control of our money must stop,” wrote Mr. Shields, who had persuaded only one other trustee to join his motion to get rid of Ariel Capital Management, another donor to Ms. Neely’s campaign fund.

The treasurer’s lawyer, Alan S. King, sent a letter to Mr. Shields on Dec. 14. “We are fully prepared to take any and all necessary legal action to protect Ms. Neely,” Mr. King wrote.

In an interview this week, Ms. Neely said she was justified in threatening to sue and strongly denied that campaign cash influenced her actions on the boards of the police pension fund and other public employee funds.

“My reputation is all I have,” she said. “I have acted in the best interests of the funds.”

Sandy Davidson, a professor of communications law at the University of Missouri, said Mr. Shields had not defamed Ms. Neely. His “shakedown” comment, Ms. Davidson said, is a classic example of free speech known in legal circles as rhetorical hyperbole.

“The Supreme Court has made it clear that it is so important we have this wide-open, robust debate, especially in political disputes,” Ms. Davidson said after reviewing Mr. Shields’s articles. “Public officials voluntarily assume the risk that they will face scrutiny.”

Indeed, case law sets a higher standard for proving libel against public figures.

Mr. Shields called on Ms. Neely to give back campaign cash from companies that manage the money police officers contributed to their pension fund. Only then, he said, would he ease his scrutiny of her.