END OF AN ERA

Local Paper Shuts Down After Mayor’s $1.1 Million Defamation Suit

The Everett Leader-Herald, in circulation since 1885, will shut its doors after the city’s mayor filed the suit.

The Everett Leader-Herald, a Massachusetts local paper in business for nearly 140 years, will shut down over a $1.1 million defamation suit for fabricating stories about Everett’s mayor. Court documents showed that the paper’s editor, Joshua Resnek, admitted to making up allegations about Mayor Carlo DeMaria to hurt him politically, including branding him as “Kickback Carlo.” “Each week, 52 times a year, I invent the Leader Herald… The mayor is my enemy… It takes me two days away from important writing every week to create this s---,” Resnek wrote in an email, according to the court docs. DeMaria filed a suit against the paper’s leaders in 2021. After the settlement, he said in a statement: “What the Everett Leader-Herald, its owner, and its publisher and editor did to my family and me... wasn’t just dishonest. It was corrupt.” The paper agreed to cease publication this week and pay the mayor $1.1 million, he said.