News Anchor Found To Have Destroyed Potentially Key Evidence — Case Thrown Out Against CBS Affiliate
jonathanturley
There is an interesting development in the saga involving two television anchors who reportedly had an alleged affair that then went bad . . . really bad. We have previously discussed the scandal involving Alycia Lane and Larry Mendte. Now a judge has thrown out Lane’s defamation claims against her former television station after learning that Lane went to an Apple store and asked for her computer to be wiped clean after she filed her lawsuit. The procedure wiped out key potential evidence of emails. She now works for NBC.
Mendte admitted to hacking into Lane’s email, was fired from his $700,000-a-year job and served six months house arrest. After the alleged affair broke up, Lane accused Mendte of sending out messages from her account to embarrass her. She later sued the Philadelphia CBS affiliate KYW for failing to investigate her claims as well as defamation.
Lane, who is now an anchor in Los Angeles, denied knowing when she had the computer wiped but records show that it was in 2008 after she filed her lawsuit.
Lane was not fired over the alleged affair but rather after she was arrested for allegedly punching a police officer in December 2007 in New York City and calling the officer a ‘f****** dyke b****’ during a drunken rage. While the charges were dropped, she was dropped by the station. The judge threw out Alycia Lane’s suit against KYW-TV as well as some of the claims against Larry Mendte. However some of the claims against Mendte will go forward.
The destruction of the evidence is surprising and problematic since emails were always the core of the allegations in the case. It is not clear whether she had been told of her obligation to preserve material records by counsel or opposing counsel but it should have been obvious.
