No Orangutans Allowed

Judge Thomas G Grover also ordered the website’s publisher Kalmar Gronvall to maintain a distance of 200 yards from the mayor and her family.

The judge said the cartoon in which the mayor’s “pictures, which apparently ended up being incorporated into some sort of juxtaposition of the face on an orangutan or some such thing” was “certainly outrageous … certainly shocking and … certainly disturbing.”
Gronvall who lists himself as sole editor, publisher and reporter of the Midwest Times on the website, has repeatedly criticized Marquardt as a racist, descendant of Hitler and a mad scientist’s clone of “DNA cells from an exhumed southern belle and an orangutan.”

Gronvall is a follower of Samanta Roy, a 67-year-old Indian immigrant from Orissa, who arrived in the area in the mid-1970s as Rama Behera and now leads an ascetic Christian religious order in the county. Gronvall told Little India that the mayor and city officials are racists who view the Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology (SIST) as a cult and are hell-bent on driving the group and its founder, who has a “different ethnic background” and a “different color skin” from the town of some 8,000 residents. Gronvall claims that he ended his official affiliation as SIST’s chief financial officer in 2006. However, in her lawsuit the mayor links him to SIST and is suing it as well.

Marquardt recently told the media: “I don’t think that it means that you have a right to say untruths, to harass, to threaten, to make a mockery out of people, to put their pictures on faces of animals and those types of very cruel, cruel things.” Her attorney sought and the judge orally granted an injunction directing Gronvall to “collect and destroy” all existing defamatory statements against the mayor on his website.

Gronvall’s attorney Rebecca Gietman argues her client has a constitutional right to express his opinions, however offensively: “I would suggest someone hop online and look up George Bush and you can see him dancing in high heels.”

Judge Grover was unpersuaded: “This is not freedom of the press. This, in my opinion, has got nothing to do with freedom of the press.” He added: “When somebody takes it upon themselves to call themselves, that person, a reporter and then promote a line of thought, I don’t think that is free press. I think the free press, by its definition, means that it is somebody who reports to the public what is going on on (sic) a factual basis.”