A staffer for former State Sen. Marty Golden is seeking $5.5 million in damages from Sen. Andrew Gounardes and friends for defaming his character and libel.
Ian Walsh Reilly, president of the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan and who also worked for Golden, maintains he’s been smeared by Gounardes’ team, among others. In response, Reilly has filed the lawsuit through the Supreme Court of the State of New York.
Reilly once invited the founder of the Proud Boys to speak at the Met Club, which led to a number of individuals and news outlets to label the former staffer as a member of the Proud Boys himself. Violence erupted after the Proud Boys founder speech at the Met Club, where Proud Boys fought with Antifa protesters outside. Some Proud Boys were charged after the incident.
Multiple groups published statements stating Reilly is affiliated with the controversial group. Gounardes is the focus of the lawsuit because his staff used the accusation in a fundraising pitch to advance their campaign against Reilly’s boss.
“I am horrified by the revelation that my opponent has a member of the white nationalist group Proud Boys on his payroll,” wrote Gounardes’ team. “New York cannot afford to have anyone in office that associates himself with hate. We need to fire Marty Golden and send a message that hate has no home in our district.”
One year later, Reilly is suing Andrew Gounardes, Andrew for New York, Friends of Andrew Gounardes, Fight Back Bay Ridge, Radio Free Bay Ridge, and two individuals, for falsely accusing him of being a member of the Proud Boys. All parties republished a defamatory statement made on October 17th, 2018 in the heat of the election involving Marty Golden last year. Golden was seeking his 9th term in office when he was defeated by Gounardes.
“It was a completely false claim that Ian Walsh Reilly was a member of the Proud Boys, which he has never been,” Reilly’s lawyer, Dennis Houdek, told Kings County Politics. “Then various people took that statement and ran with it – it was reckless.”
The situation symbolizes the trickling-down of national political ideology and the polarization of local politics. In his race to become President of the Met Club, Reilly challenged his opponent’s loyalty to Donald Trump, casting himself as the more right-leaning candidate. At the same time, the Brooklyn left perpetuated fake news, using it to advance their credibility with liberal voters.
“Ian was elected as the President of the Metropolitan Republican Club, but this was used against him in that campaign. And Andrew Gounardes used this to his benefit in the last several weeks of his successful campaign,” suggested Houdek.
“It helped Gounardes raise a lot of money in the last couple weeks of his campaign to unseat Marty Golden,” he added, “Who knows if it might have made the difference.”
The emergence of the lawsuit comes as Golden is mulling over a rematch run against Gounardes next year.
According to the Board of Elections, Gounardes narrowly won by 1,129 more votes than Golden in November 2018.
Gounardes and his team, which did not return multiple emails and phone calls to respond to the original story posted yesterday, issued the following quote today:
“Ian Reilly’s frivolous lawsuit won’t distract from the fact that, during his time as a staffer for my Republican opponent’s campaign, he gave hate and white supremacy a platform when he invited the Proud Boys to speak at a prominent Republican club. At a time when the rising tide of hate threatens our country and our communities, I won’t back down from calling out prejudice and hate whenever and wherever it arises.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the quote from Sen. Gounardes.
