Below the Belt

Legally, a defamatory statement "tends to bring a person into disrepute, contempt, or ridicule or to impeach the person's honesty, integrity, virtue, or reputation."

Saban had the burden of proving, by clear and convincing evidence, that Hendershott "knew the statement was false when made or acted in reckless disregard of whether the statement was true or false."

As it turned out, those burdens would be too much for Saban to bear at trial.

The filing of the lawsuit allowed Dennis Wilenchik to delve into every aspect of Dan Saban's mercurial personal life, including his awful experience in the early 1970s with his adoptive mother, Ruby Norman.

As the case neared trial, an out-of-court settlement wasn't on the horizon.

Saban earlier had promised to drop the suit — in which he asked for no damages — if Joe Arpaio resigned. Fat chance.

Naturally, Saban was angry at everyone responsible for the story that aired on Channel 15 on the evening of April 30, 2004.

In the story, Ruby Norman accused Saban of raping her more than 30 years earlier, when he was in his teens. She first had gone to the East Valley Tribune to tell her tale, but a reporter there passed on it.

In early April 2004, Norman had e-mailed the sheriff's office with her name and phone number, claiming that her adoptive son, then Arpaio's opponent in the GOP primary, had done some "not so honorable" things in the past.

As vague as that was, a sheriff's lieutenant left a printed copy of the e-mail with Hendershott, the county agency's day-to-day boss.

Hendershott soon spoke by phone with Norman for a few minutes and, according to his trial testimony, she sounded "credible." The chief deputy admitted taping his chat with the woman, but after Saban's attorney asked for a copy, he said he had erased it.

Almost immediately after speaking with Norman, Hendershott had his public-information department contact Channel 15's Rob Koebel.

Now living in Florida and out of the news business, Koebel was considered the coziest of all local reporters with the publicity-driven sheriff. In a broadcast media market hardly known for in-depth reporting, such an unofficial designation takes some doing.

Koebel lost his job a few months after his big scoop hit in late April 2004, when the embittered Saban camp informed Channel 15 that the reporter had donated money to Arpaio's re-election efforts that February. Of course, reporters are not supposed to show such bias toward the people they cover.

But putting aside Koebel's campaign contribution, his stories about "America's toughest sheriff" and his minions were more propaganda than journalism. Sheriff's officials had even considered hiring Koebel as a public-information officer after Channel 15 fired him, trial testimony revealed.

Koebel had been the obvious choice to Dave Hendershott for leaking the news about the budding Saban rape allegation. In hindsight, however, it is curious that that the chief did not keep an arm's length from the reporter and from Ruby Norman.

"Mr. Hendershott doesn't like to interfere with media relations at all because he hates reporters," Lisa Allen, Arpaio's director of communications, testified during the Saban trial.

Saban's lawyer, Robbins, asked Allen if it would surprise her to learn the chief had spoken to Koebel for a total of about 45 minutes on 10 different occasions during the week or so before Channel 15 aired the Saban rape story.

"There are times when reporters are embedded with stories [and] he might have to talk with them," Allen replied, not missing a beat.

Hendershott played his tape-recorded discussion with Ruby Norman over the phone for Koebel even before sheriff's investigators had interviewed the woman.

The chief told Koebel to file a public-records request so that the sheriff's office could immediately release an "incident report" on a case that hadn't even officially started.

In fact, nobody from Arpaio's office even had laid eyes on Ruby Norman by that time — didn't even know if she had a legitimate complaint or was a crank caller. Two detectives from the agency's Threat Assessment Unit (now the Selective Enforcement Unit) soon went out to interview Norman at her home in Apache Junction.

The detectives then returned to the sheriff's headquarters in downtown Phoenix to write their report, which was transcribed by a secretary on the spot. The four-page document listed Dan Saban as a "suspect" in the rape of his adoptive mother more than three decades earlier.

"We basically will take an initial report, and it doesn't matter who it is," Hendershott later told the Saban jury. "Whether it's Mr. Saban or the cow in the dell, we're gonna take an initial report."

Mike Worley, a retired police chief who operates Police Practices Consulting in Louisville, Kentucky, says Hendershott's actions were reasonable, at first.

"What you have here probably was okay in the initial part," Worley said. "You had someone making a claim that she was assaulted by someone who was fairly prominent. I can see where a lot of law enforcement agencies would do some follow-up."

But when told that Hendershott had played the tape of his interview with Ruby Norman for a TV reporter before investigators had interviewed the woman, Worley said, "Oh, boy. When you leak a report and contact friendly media to actually involve them in the ongoing investigation to this extent, it puts things in a whole different light. That was a significant breach of acceptable conduct, under any theory."