MAINE
Portland Press Herald
BY SCOTT DOLAN STAFF WRITER
sdolan@pressherald.com | @scottddolan | 207-791-6304
The jury in the federal defamation trial of Paul Kendrick of Freeport began deliberations Thursday afternoon after listening to nearly three hours of closing arguments in the case brought against him by the American founder of an orphanage for boys in Haiti.
Michael Geilenfeld and Hearts with Haiti, the North Carolina charity that raises donations to fund his orphanage, have accused Kendrick of widely broadcasting false claims in an email campaign starting in January 2011 that Geilenfeld sexually abused some orphans in his care.
Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. told the 10 jurors in U.S. District Court in Portland that they must base their verdict on whether the plaintiffs had proven that Kendrick’s statements about Geilenfeld were false or made the statements with “reckless disregard” as to whether they were true.
Before jurors began deliberating, they had listened to nearly three weeks of testimony in the trial that started on July 7 from witnesses including Kendrick, Geilenfeld and a half-dozen former residents of St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince who said Geilenfeld sexually abused them.
“The question is, were all of these young men lying when they came forward time and time again to say they were abused by Mr. Geilenfeld,” Kendrick’s attorney, David Walker, said in his closing arguments to the jury. “They look different from us. They have different backgrounds, but it doesn’t mean they don’t know what it’s like to be touched and molested while they were teenagers by a grown man.”
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