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Clemens Files Lawsuit Against Accuser
By Administrator | January 7, 2008
Roger Clemens has filed a defamation suit against Brian McNamee, the former trainer who has claimed to have injected the pitcher with performance-enhancing drugs. McNamee’s attorney, Earl Ward, told ESPN that his client will file a counter lawsuit against Clemens, although no counter-suit has been filed yet.
Clemens filed the suit in Harris County District Court, in Texas. The suit listed fifteen statements McNamee made to the Mitchell Commission that Clemens claims are “untrue and defamatory”.
Team Clemens’ petition to the court includes the following assertion: “According to McNamee, he originally made his allegations to federal authorities after being threatened with criminal prosecution if he didn’t implicate Clemens”. The suit alleges that McNamee denied Clemens had used steroids or human growth hormone when he first was interviewed by federal law enforcement last June, and quotes McNamee as saying he was pressured by Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Parrella and IRS Special Agent Jeff Novitzky to implicate Clemens. It then continues: “After this exchange, and for the first time in his life, McNamee stated that he had injected Clemens with steroids in 1998, 2000 and 2001… Following his recantation, McNamee has relayed that he magically went from a ‘target’ in a federal criminal drug investigation to a mere ‘witness,’ so long as he continued to ‘toe the line.’ ”
Richard Emery, another of McNamee’s lawyers, said he would seek to remove the case from U.S. District Court in Houston, and then possibly shift it to federal court in Brooklyn, NY: “I think it’s dismissible on its face. I think it’s a press release for Clemens and his career. The case is shoddy at best. The prosecutors acted completely professionally in this case. This is a very odd thing for me to be saying, but it’s the truth. Sometimes you are bound by the truth”.
Team Clemens asserts that McNamee initially refused a request from the same federal authorities to speak to the Mitchell Commission, but that when he was threatened with prosecution McNamee decided to cooperate with Mitchell. The suit asserts that McNamee said the interview “was conducted like a Cold War era interrogation in which a federal agent merely read to the Mitchell investigators McNamee’s previously obtained statement (provided to federal authorities) and then asked McNamee to confirm what he previously stated”.
The suit continues: “Clemens’ good reputation has been severely injured. McNamee’s false allegations have also caused Clemens to suffer mental anguish, shame, public humiliation and embarrassment”.
Ward believes Clemens filing the lawsuit is the pitcher’s way of getting out of testifying at next week’s congressional hearings: “(The lawsuit is an) amateur and transparent attempt to try to avoid testifying before Congress”. Clemens’ attorney, Rusty Hardin, has said the lawsuit wouldn’t keep Clemens from potentially testifying before the hearing… at a late-afternoon press conference today he announced that Clemens contacted the congressional committee and confirmed he will be there — without a subpoena.
Topics: Around Baseball, Sox Players |
