Jury orders blogger to pay $8.4 million to ex-Army colonel

Col. David “Wil” Riggins, after a highly decorated Army career that included multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was on the verge of promotion to brigadier general in July 2013 when he got a phone call at the Pentagon from the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division to come in for a meeting. Once there, he learned that a blogger in Washington state had just accused him of raping her, when both were cadets at West Point in 1986. An investigation was underway.

Riggins waived his right to an attorney and immediately gave a statement denying any sexual assault of the woman, Susan Shannon of Everett, Washington. Shannon also cooperated with the CID investigation, which could not “prove or disprove Ms. Shannon’s allegation she was raped,” the CID report concluded. But in the spring of 2014, with the armed forces facing heavy criticism for their handling of sexual assault cases, Secretary of the Army John McHugh recommended removing Riggins from the list for promotion to general. Riggins promptly retired.

Then, Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was “provably false,” and that she wrote two blog posts and a Facebook post “to intentionally derail [his] promotion” to brigadier general. During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Virginia, heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2½ hours of deliberation, jurors sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens. The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages, “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” according to one of the jurors.

In Virginia, punitive damages are limited to $350,000, and lawyers for both sides said the compensatory damages would likely be reduced to $2 million, leaving a final judgment of $2.3 million against Shannon, a stayat-home mother of three teenagers. The verdict came just days after a jury in Dallas awarded more than $1 million in damages to a wedding photographer who was harshly criticized by a beauty blogger, causing the photographer’s business to collapse.

Shannon, 52, said she was devastated by the verdict and fearful for her family’s future. “I feel like I’m a financial slave for the rest of my life” to Riggins, Shannon said. “I told the truth in my article and at trial.” She and her lawyer, Benjamin Trichilo, said in an interview that they felt Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Daniel E. Ortiz wrongly prevented them from presenting witnesses and evidence about Riggins’s past and the Army CID investigation findings, and they plan to appeal.