‘Influential’ NC car dealer charged with molesting teen boy, unsealed court records show
.jpg "The N.C. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Fayetteville Observer in Tuesday.")
The N.C. Court of Appeals reversed a decision Tuesday that sealed an entire court file involving child sex abuse and denied a Fayetteville newspaper access to any of the information inside.
In its ruling, a three-judge panel called closing off every aspect of the case “unprecedented” in North Carolina history and ordered that the file be unsealed without naming the juveniles or giving any information to identify them.
In a 51-page decision, Judge Donna Stroud described reducing the file to the date of its filing and the names of attorneys arguing the case as “overbroad.”
“The public, including (the) Newspaper, has a presumptive right of access to court files,” Stroud said.
The decision marked a First Amendment victory for the Fayetteville Observer, which has sought to view the case since last year.
A now-retired reporter at the Observer learned from a Superior Court judge that the case involved car dealer Mike Lallier, who had been charged in September with molesting a 15-year-old boy at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, according to Matt Leclercq, the newspaper’s executive editor.
Lallier, a former board member for Fayetteville’s Public Works Commission, “has been a significant and influential contributor in city and county politics for years,” Leclercq wrote.
Reacting to the decision, Leclercq said in a statement Tuesday:
“It is so fundamental that our justice system is open and transparent. People have a right to know what goes on in their courthouse, and the decisions made by their elected judges. In this particular case, the entire case file was sealed, to include the judge’s own seal order. No one would have ever known that this case even existed, if we hadn’t challenged the seal. We have always been sensitive to the fact that this civil case involves minors who alleged sexual abuse, and we never asked the court to reveal their identities.”
The open records case, named Doe v. Doe, stems from a 2016 complaint filed by juvenile plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse. The Superior Court in Cumberland County blocked the case from public view at the same time it was filed, making even the defendants’ names unavailable.
“We have been unable to find any other case in North Carolina in which the entire court file, including the court orders sealing the file, has been sealed,” Stroud wrote in her Tuesday decision.
The case was settled and dismissed in December 2016 and remained sealed, records said, because the trial court sought to guard the identities of juveniles involved and of criminal prosecution still pending in South Carolina.
But the appeals court noted a long history of alternate methods of protecting the names of juvenile victims, including having names redacted from files or having them testify remotely.
The trial court’s protections go “far beyond” the norm, Stroud wrote.
Defendants’ names, lawyers names and guardians ad litem were to be immediately unsealed, the court wrote.
This story was originally published December 18, 2018 at 12:41 PM.