SALINE CO.— Todd Fort, the disgraced former Saline County chief deputy and school board president who used his positions of authority to lure at least one unsuspecting teenage girl into a sexual relationship and is now claiming he is the victim, was slapped in the face with a bit of not only law but reality recently: the state’s attorney general’s office filed a response to his frivolous lawsuit in which he cries about his jailhouse phone conversations being released under the Freedom Of Information Act.
The utter absurdity in the case is that every time Fort used the phone, he had to listen to a recorded message about how his conversations would be monitored, just like in the jail he used to run in Harrisburg before his fall from grace in July 2010.
On numerous occasions, while Fort was chief deputy, recordings of jail conversations were used in a courtroom setting and were always available to anyone from the public who asked for them.
Preyed on underage girls
The fall from grace began when locals learned that Fort, while chief deputy, began a sexual relationship with a girl who, he protests to this day, did not commence until after her 17th birthday in April 2010.
At that time, in addition to meeting the teen at his house over lunch hour in Harrisburg for sex, Todd Fort, as school board president, actually went on out-of-state trips with his 17-year-old victim, under the auspices that she was acting as babysitter for his then 11-year-old daughter.
He had already hired the teen to work for him at the sheriff’s department as an intern for a program the sheriff’s department had been conducting for a number of years, menacing (and some say threatening) any prospective young suitor who got close to the girl.
The relationship came to a screeching halt when the teen’s father caught Fort with his daughter in a county squad car after which a high-speed chase ensued, this on July 19, 2010.
During the chase through the county, Fort used unsuspecting county deputies to run interference with the father and even used one deputy to take the victim out of his cruiser and away from the scene before the victim’s father arrived.
Arrested and charged
He was ultimately arrested and charged with several counts of Criminal Sexual Assault.
He even violated the terms of a $25,000 cash bond raised by family and friends he constantly badgered on the jail phone asking them to sell their belongings, donate money and even approach some shady Saline and Williamson county businessmen to help him with bond money.
Within weeks of the bond being posted, however, Fort was taken back into custody for contacting the teenage victim he said he was in love with.
There have always been unconfirmed suspicions that Fort had used his positions of authority to have sex with several other underage schoolgirls.
On September 16, 2011 after wrangling with the case and additional charges of official misconduct and theft from a government entity (the county) for more than a year, Fort entered a negotiated plea to a single count of Aggravated Criminal Sexual Abuse with a victim between the ages of 13-18 with the abuser being in a position of trust or authority over her.
Fort spent just a few months in the Illinois Department of Corrections before being paroled and coming to live back in an apartment in Harrisburg where he has apparently been plotting some form of legal revenge.
Enter Robert Wilson
Part of that revenge has come in the form of Fort parading area media, with the exception of Disclosure, into the courthouse so they could cover him filing his lawsuit that makes little or no sense, this occurring back at the end of June, 2013.
In brief, Fort has targeted Saline County State’s Attorney Mike Henshaw for turning over to Disclosure recorded phone calls of Fort’s conversations with friends and family while Fort was jailed at the Jackson County Detention Center in Murphysboro pending trial in his felony sexual assault case.
Fort is whining because Henshaw, pursuant to a Freedom Of Information Act request, per the law turned over audio recordings of Fort’s jailhouse phone calls to Disclosure who published some of the calls.
Assistant Attorney General Karen L. McNaught is representing Henshaw and the people of Illinois against Fort’s ludicrous lawsuit some believe is designed not to be won but to be the first in a series of moves by the likes of Robert Wilson to make Henshaw look bad ahead of the 2016 election.
Wilson has vowed the people of Saline County will be paying his attorney niece’s paycheck when he replaces Henshaw and makes her state’s attorneys.
In fact, Wilson is rumored to be Fort’s financial backer, allowing him to afford high-end Carbondale attorney, Darrell Dunham.
“…no expectation of privacy on jailhouse telephone”
In her motion to dismiss, McNaught argues the entire lawsuit should be tossed out because other than showing that he was furious and claiming hurt feelings, Fort’s lawsuit doesn’t spell out exactly what Henshaw supposedly did in following the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) law that warrants a lawsuit just because Disclosure asked for, obtained and published portions of his jailhouse phone calls.
“Angela Howser, a member of the media, contacted the Jackson County Jail and made an inquiry as to how to obtain copies of Fort’s telephone conversations and was informed that the Saline County State’s Attorney had possession of the recordings,” McNaught writes in her document filed July 31 in support of dismissal of the suit. “Howser made a written request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act to the state’s attorney for the audio recordings… the state’s attorney complied with the request.”
Dunham doesn’t even claim that his client believes his privacy was violated.
“Rather plaintiff [Fort] pleaded in his complaint that he made phone calls from the Jackson County jail. There is no allegation that the state’s attorney committed an unauthorized act to gain access to plaintiff’s telephone conversations,” McNaught says in her motion.
McNaught even presents case law in which the Appellate Court said: “…there is no expectation of privacy on a jailhouse telephone where the inmate is adequately warned that his conversations may be monitored.”
Fort was warned each and every time he made a call by a prerecorded message, which also, incidentally, warned the person on the other end (most often Fort’s sister or another supporter) that the call was being recorded, as well..
Public disclosure of private facts?
McNaught goes on to say that while Fort claims he has suffered the requisite ‘extreme emotional distress’ needed to attain a certain level for a lawsuit, he doesn’t bother detailing exactly what ‘private facts’ were disclosed to the public by Henshaw that caused such ‘suffering.’
And by law, Fort must be that specific.
In fact Fort only makes vague references to conversations that contained information about the health of some of his relatives and the well-being of his children, but makes no references to facts about himself.
The law dictates that for Fort to be successful in this part of his lawsuit, he must prove the facts published to the public were private and that the general public had no knowledge of them and that they were presented to the public in such a way as to be ‘highly offensive to a reasonable person.’
It was Fort who spoke on a known recorded telephone conversation about the health and well-being of his children and Disclosure who published some of those conversations unedited.
Henshaw merely followed the law in releasing the recorded conversations and had no control over what Disclosure published or didn’t publish.
Absolute immunity
It has been a longstanding law that state’s attorneys—and nearly every other governing body in the United States—have absolute immunity where it comes to their decision to responding to a FOIA within the confines of the law to a FOIA request. In other words, the public official, once he responds to a FOIA, is not held responsible for how the material obtained via FOIA is used once that material is out of the hands of the public official.
Again, Henshaw merely followed the law in releasing the recorded conversations.
As defined by the Freedom Of Information Act, “public records includes, and documents, digital or printed; photographs, digital or printed; tapes and recordings electronic or digital that have been prepared for, used by, received by, or are in the possession or under the control of any public body.”
The FOIA goes on to say “…civil penalties, costs and an award of attorney’s fees are available against the public body for wrongfully denying records.”
The Saline County State’s Attorney’s office was in possession of the records at the time they were requested and under penalty of law had no choice but to comply with the request by Disclosure.
Absolute public official immunity, as prescribed by law, regardless of what a third party may do with the information, is guaranteed, if the decision to release the information was made as part of a governmental decision.
Again, Henshaw had no choice but to release the recordings or he would be subject to FOIA violation.
Little Molly Wilson-Dearing
Fort has made no effort to file suit against the Jackson County sheriff’s department, who actually recorded the calls; Illinois State Police, who obtained the calls from Jackson County and gave them to the agency in charge of Fort’s investigation (Saline County); or Disclosure, who actually published some of them.
This fact might be another indication, many believe, that Fort, Dunham and possibly Robert Wilson all know the suit will lead nowhere except maybe to a bad enough rep for Henshaw so that little Molly Wilson-Dearing can make her living off the backs of the taxpayers via manipulation of the voting public.
McNaught, in her July 31 filing, has asked the entire case be thrown out.
Already, two judges have recused themselves from hearing the case: Judge Todd Lambert and Judge Walden Morris. Currently, Judge Joe Leberman has the case, but whether he will remain or not is unknown.
There was no next setting made to hear the case as of press time.