With friends like these ...

I have been wrapped up in some pretty dumb litigation the last two years. If "stupendous" could be defined as "advanced stupidity," then you could consider the lawsuit against me and others to indeed have stupendous qualities.

Some background: At a previous job I held in cable ad sales, the company I worked for had offices all over the state; I worked in the Bloomington office, while the main office in the state was in Anderson, about three hours north of Bloomington. Because of the fact that we were a satellite office (pardon the pun there), I had contact multiple times a day with people in the main office. I made friends there, friends who I still have despite my departure from the company in the fall of 2004.

One person, who I'll call Tracy (not her real name), was one of my main contacts there. She handled ad traffic for the Bloomington market for a time. Tracy was someone who I had considered one of the aforementioned "friends."

Another friend I thought I had made was a man named Van (not his real name). Tracy had been assigned to handle another market's ad traffic, and Van was the person they had hired to handle our market. Van and I had also struck up a friendship. He had sent me some pipes and pipe tobacco that he had purchased from a tobacconist in Gatlinburg; I was too polite to turn it down in spite of the fact that cigarettes are my selected vice, not pipes. I thought it was a nice gesture, though.

After Tracy left the company in early 2004 under somewhat mysterious circumstances, I was one of the first people she called, and we made a promise to keep in touch. We traded e-mail for a short time afterwards, and as is my wont, ended up falling out of touch for no particular reason. She had asked me if my wife and I would come up to her house to spend an afternoon with her and her husband. I never took her up on the invitation – not out of malice, but because she lived near Anderson, which is a long friggin' ways away.

Van was also out of the company in short order, for various performance-related reasons. I thought it too bad, and Van also asked if my wife and I would come up to the metropolitan Anderson area someday; perhaps we could have spent a day at the horse track up there. Again, I never took him up on the invitation, being rather trapped by my own inertia on the weekends. Plus, Wife was pregnant at the time, and it had been a difficult pregnancy anyway. I made an empty promise to make the trip up "sometime."

Several months passed, and the Monday after my son came home in June 2004 after a three-week stay in the NICU, I returned to work and was subsequently served with legal papers.

Two other people in the company, both of whom worked in Anderson, and I were being sued, along with the company itself, for slander. The plaintiff in the suit was Tracy. Tracy had named me in the suit thanks to a "statement" (read: unfounded allegations that were wrapped in lies) against me from Van. Tracy also sued her former boss and another man in the company.

Unbelievable.

Would they have named me in the suit if I had kept up the friendships I thought I had with them? I don't know. I know I spent a lot of the summer – which should have been the happiest time of my life, thanks to the birth of my son – dwelling on the suit and feeling guilty about not trying harder.

The gist of the suit against me was that I had called up to the Anderson office one day, and Tracy wasn't there; this was while Van was still being trained, so I was still in contact with Tracy because she was still my main traffic coordinator. So, because Tracy wasn't there, I rang Van's phone and supposedly asked of Tracy's whereabouts, and when Van told me that she wasn't there that day, I supposedly said, "Oh, she must be gone for an STD appointment."

Except, as you hopefully have gleaned from the previous paragraph, I never said it.

Unbelievable.

Doesn't that just sound ridiculous? I mean, who even says "STD" anymore? Especially in that context? I had no knowledge of Tracy's sexual history, because it wasn't my business and I never made it my business. People who are more petty and have smaller minds might concern themselves with whatever diseases other people might be carrying. And even if Tracy had a problem like that, it wouldn't have mattered to me – I still would have considered her my friend.

Anyway, I've had this hanging over my head for the better part of two years. While I've been confident that the truth would prevail, it's been a rather worrisome time regardless; juries have been known to be stupid, and this thing's been inching toward a jury trial.

But good news arrived last month and again yesterday:

Van gave an affidavit to our lawyers in the case and completely bungled his version of the facts. He said that I had an office in the Anderson office, and that we had seen each other every day and so on and so forth. Then, he realized his mistake, backtracked and said that he was talking about one of the other people being sued. It really made for hilarious reading.

The damage was done; if he couldn't even be trusted to get information right like which office I worked in – really basic stuff - how in the hell could he be believed when he says that I said something that I clearly didn't? Fabulous work, Van! (Dumbass.)

Consequently, the judge in the case determined that the suit against me was wholly without merit, and that I should be dropped from the suit. Tracy had one month to appeal my exclusion from the case, and that one month passed last week without appeal, says the lawyers.

Pending the final order from the judge, this case should finally, thankfully, be a part of my past. I wish I had the resources for a countersuit against them, but attorneys supposedly don't typically take slander cases on contingency basis (that is to say, you don't pay until after you win). I'm not one of those litigation-happy people who wants to drag people into court at every opportunity, but …

This suit has really been a drain on me emotionally and mentally, and I would like to determine whether I have any recourse as far as that goes. Here's my thinking:

There are sworn statements on paper that contain various lies about things I was purported to have said - doesn't this amount to defamation of my character? (As if my character could be anymore defamed from any self-inflicted defamation, right?) I'm no lawyer, as you may well know, but doesn't it follow that the depositions that were given against me are a matter of public record? The fact that I've been tentatively dropped from the suit may expunge those things from the record, but regardless, I'm not sure that being dropped from the suit is reward enough for the stress and anguish - and there's a term that lawyers love to pounce on: "mental anguish" - of the last two years. "Congratulations - you get to keep your future income!" Hooray?