Including information about his associates
November 30, 2001
Willis Carto, founder of the now-defunct Liberty Lobby organization, has announced yet another lawsuit against the Institute for Historical Review. The web site of American Free Press — successor to the Liberty Lobby’s weekly tabloid, The Spotlight — reports that Carto last week filed a $35 million lawsuit in Texas against Mark Weber, Greg Raven, and the IHR, charging them with defamation. The suit was filed with no warning whatsoever, and because it has not yet been served, details of the suit are unknown.
This is Carto’s second suit against IHR in Texas, and his third defamation suit against these defendants. The first, a $100 million RICO
suit, was filed in January 1998. Carto’s weekly tabloid, The Spotlight, confidently told readers that his forthcoming victory in this suit would reverse his string of disastrous losses in the drawn-out legal battle with the IHR, which arose from Carto’s improper diversion of millions of dollars from IHR and its parent corporation. Before it came to trial, a Washington, DC, judge dismissed the suit — which was not supported with a single piece of evidence — as utterly without merit.
Carto filed the second lawsuit, a $43 million Lanham Act
suit, in February 2001, in breach of his signed agreement to cease legal action against the IHR. It also was dismissed by the court. Simply by filing this second suit, however, Carto and Liberty Lobby were in default of a provision of their 1998 bankruptcy, and Liberty Lobby once again owed IHR the full amount of a 1996 judgment. Pleading poverty despite millions of dollars of annual income (which have since disappeared without a trace), Carto stopped publication of The Spotlight and improperly transferred Liberty Lobby assets to American Free Press.
Although Carto claims himself to be a penniless resident of California, he continues to bring expensive lawsuits against IHR.
Carto’s American Free Press weekly is urging readers to sue IHR for lost subscriptions to The Spotlight. Last week Carto’s Panama-based dummy corporation sued IHR to try to stop the sale of his hillside residence in Escondido, California.