A week after losing his bid for city comptroller, disgraced former lov gov Eliot Spitzer earned a victory of sorts on Tuesday from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with a Manhattan federal Judge’s 2012 decision to toss a $90 million libel lawsuit against Spitzer.
The suit by insurance big William Gilman, a former exec at Marsh & McLennan, had accused Spizter and Slate.com of sliming Gilman with false kickback allegations in an August 2010 column that Spitzer wrote for the online magazine.
In the column, headlined “They Still Don’t Get It,” the hard-charging Spitzer — who once proclaimed, “I’m a f- -king steamroller” — said the plaintiffs’ former employer represented the essence of corporate greed.
“Marsh’s behavior was a blatant abuse of law and market power: price-fixing, bid-rigging and kickbacks,” Spitzer wrote in the piece, which he said he penned to counter a Wall Street Journal editorial that sought to “disparage the cases my office brought against Marsh & McLennan.”
The AG’s office under Spitzer had gone after Marsh & McLennan for excessive “contingent commissions,” fees paid by insurers to brokers, in the early 2000s, and the civil action forced an $850 million payout from the company in 2004.
Gilman – who was never named in the article — was indicted on 37 counts of insurance fraud in State Supreme Court in 2005 while Spitzer was Attorney General of New York. He was convicted of only one charge, but a judge threw out his sentence in 2011.
“Spitzer refers to ‘Marsh’ as a company,” the panel wrote in a five-page opinion upholding Judge Paul Oetken’s ruling. “Such a broad reference to an organization cannot give rise to a defamation claim by one of its constituent members.”
Gilman could not immediately be reached for comment.