A lawyer for “Sugar” Shane Mosley’s ex-wife told a jury Thursday that the boxer should pay a seven-figure sum and punitive damages for allegedly defaming her in media interviews, but the fighter’s attorney said his client had the right to speak out because the days of “Jim Crow” and “dark” times are over.
“Does anyone think in 2017 that it’s OK to tell a grown man, `Shut your mouth’?” Mosley’s lawyer, Marc Little, asked the Los Angeles Superior Court jury hearing final arguments in trial of Jin Mosley’s defamation suit.
Little said the days of Jim Crow in the U.S. are gone.
“There was a dark time in this country, but that time has passed,” Little said in asking the jury to award Jin Mosley nothing. “It’s time to say enough is enough.”
But Jin Mosley’s lawyer, Michael Artan, said there was no racial component to his argument.
“Dark times and Jim Crow seems a little misplaced,” Artan said. “If you’re going to lie, keep your mouth shut. It only undermines those ideas.”
In her lawsuit, which was filed in November 2015, the 41-year-old plaintiff says her divorce from her first husband occurred in 2002 and alleges Mosley defamed her in 2015 by telling a celebrity website videographer, “Man, my so-called wife was married when I was married.”
The encounter with the videographer occurred at the same downtown Los Angeles courthouse where the defamation trial is being heard.
At the time, the boxer was trying to freeze the assets in his divorce judgment based on a document obtained by his family law attorneys that Jin Mosley’s prior marriage was not finalized until September 2006, according to his current lawyers’ court papers.
The plaintiff alleges the second defamatory statement involving bigamy occurred later in 2015 when Mosley told a FightHype.com reporter at Los Angeles International Airport, “So we got married in 2002 and she got married to some guy in 1995 and was still married to him when we got married.”
However, attorneys for Jin Mosley say their client divorced her first husband in New York in 2002, before she wed Mosley. They say Jin Mosley’s prior husband inexplicably obtained a second divorce judgment from the plaintiff, this time in 2006 and in another jurisdiction of New York.
Artan told jurors that in addition to the media interviews, Mosley additionally disparaged the plaintiff on Twitter, including one posting that said, “Enjoy the ramen noodles (epithet).” He said the panel should disregard Mosley’s claims that the tweets were put up by his public relations staff.
“He knows who wrote those tweets, he wrote those tweets,” Artan said. “These terrible, wild statements do not go away.”
Artan said Jin Mosley deserves at least $1 million, plus punitive damages. He says she has suffered emotional distress and her career as a life coach has been negatively affected by the allegedly defamatory statements.
“He acted with extreme disregard of Ms. Mosley’s rights,” Artan said. “If you go on TV and say your wife’s a criminal, that’s despicable.”
Artan said Jin Mosley used to have an active social life and volunteered at her children’s school, but “that world was knocked off its axis by those statements.”
But Little said his client did not defame the plaintiff because the 45- year-old fighter did not say anything false. He had a reasonable belief that the documents showing she was divorced from her first husband in 2006 were accurate and he had the right to answer questions from the media, Little said.
Little said his client has not only been a good father to his own children, but also to Jin Mosley’s oldest child, who was born when she was in a relationship with a man she never married. Her son is now 23 years old.
“This is who he is, this is the man,” Little said. “Ms. Mosley wants you to believe he lied on her.”
Little said although Jin Mosley did not get her wish that the fighter get a vasectomy as part of their divorce, she still walked away with three of his championship belts and about $6 million in assets.
“Now she wants a little bit more,” Little said.
The Mosleys had three children together. The first two were born before they were married and while Jin Mosley was still wed to her first husband.
— City News Service