A day after Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill accused her Republican opponent of complicity in the nation’s deadly opioid crisis, Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign said it plans to file a defamation lawsuit against her.
Sherrill during this week’s second and final debate between the candidates charged that Ciattarelli “killed tens of thousands of people” by printing misinformation and propaganda, in connection with his former medical publishing company.
After the debate, the former state Assemblyman called Sherrill’s charges “another desperate tactic by a desperate campaign on behalf of a desperate candidate. It’s a lie!”
On Thursday evening, his campaign struck back. It said it expects to go to court next week to sue Sherrill for defamation over what some have called an “inflammatory and irresponsible allegation” specific to Ciattarelli’s business career.
“Last night, faced with continued questions about her refusal to release disciplinary records that would reveal her true role in the Naval Academy cheating scandal, and pressed about her unusually abbreviated tenure as a federal prosecutor, Mikie Sherrill cracked. In doing so, she claimed — twice — that Jack Ciattarelli ‘killed tens of thousands of people, including children,‘ a clearly defamatory attack that shocked the moderators, press, and public alike,” said Ciattarelli strategist Chris Russell in a statement.
He added, “In a time where political violence and violent rhetoric are becoming all too prevalent, Mikie Sherrill baselessly and recklessly accusing a political opponent of mass murder in a televised debate crosses the line.”
Sherrill campaign officials did not immediately respond.
Ciattarelli’s business
The accusations regarding complicity in the opioid epidemic stemmed from public records which NJ.com and The Star-Ledger first wrote about in 2021 during the last campaign for governor, in connection with medical publishing company then operated by Ciattarelli.
Galen Publishing, which the former Republican legislator sold in 2017, produced continuing education materials for major universities — much of it funded by millions in grants from some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical industry, records showed. Among the published pieces included some focusing on pain management which appeared to downplay the dangers of opioids.
Sherrill had also charged during the debate that Ciattarelli had helped as well in developing a computer app “so that people who were addicted could more easily get access to opioids.”
Records on file with the University of California San Francisco in connection with the mountain of legal filings related to the opioid crisis do show that an associated Ciattarelli company doing business as Advanced Studies in Medicine, or ASiM, teamed up to create an on-line “virtual pain coach” for chronic pain sufferers that was funded by a pharmaceutical company.
The continuing education materials were published by Galen under a contract with the University of Tennessee, NJ.com found.
The university licensed and accredited continuing education materials produced as part of “The University of Tennessee College of Pharmacy Advanced Studies in Pharmacy.” According to records filed with Tennessee General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee, Galen secured the funding using its contacts and partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry, leveraging its connections with more than two dozen pharmaceutical companies.
“Galen Publishing is the only vendor in the country with the facilities, wealth of industry contacts, access to live seminars and the editorial expertise to provide the services for which the university would lend its name to enter into this partnership,” school officials wrote in justifying the non-competitive contract to the Fiscal Review Committee.
At the time, officials with the 2021 Ciattarelli for Governor campaign said the topics for continuing education came from University of Tennessee faculty and never from drug manufacturers. Galen, they said, then took the idea for a continuing education class, created a grant application with input from faculty and submitted it to pharmaceutical companies with interests in those areas.
The university, which maintained editorial oversight and overall approval, was paid 8% of all grant money secured by Galen for the use of its name and accreditation on the materials.
Between 2008 and 2017, when Ciattarelli sold the firm, $13.2 million in grants were awarded for the program. The university retained $1.04 million and paid Galen just over $12.2 million, according to records describing the contract.
The pain management app, according to the records kept by the University of California, was funded through Teva Pharmaceuticals, which later settled claims across the country, including the state of New Jersey, that the company helped fuel the nation’s opioid crisis.
The kind of work that Ciattarelli’s company did has come under criticism.
Adriane Fugh-Berman, professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University who heads PharmedOut, a group that monitors pharmaceutical industry marketing efforts, said on Thursday that medical education and communication companies are in fact “pharma vendors that process marketing messages into activities that look educational, but are actually advertising.”
Only a very few refuse to work with pharmaceutical companies, she said.
“Accreditation by an academic institution adds a veneer of credibility, but these institutions are not skilled in identifying promotion and they have conflict of interest as well if they are getting money for the accreditation,” she said.
Before Ciattarelli’s camp announced it would sue, some political observers noted the increasingly negative campaign being waged between the candidates.
Dan Cassino, who heads the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, called the Sherrill claim an “over the top” accusation, noting that the charge needed “a lot of context and hedging to make any sense at all.”
But he added it appeared like a “tit-for-tat between the campaigns,” referencing the earlier charges by the Ciattarelli campaign that Sherrill had been caught up in a notorious cheating scandal when she was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Sherrill had responded that she did not cheat, but had been penalized because she would not turn in her classmates involved in the infamous scandal. While allowed to graduate, she was not permitted to walk in the procession with the rest of her classmates at commencement.
The accusations subsequently led to an outcry the improper release of the congresswoman’s unredacted military records to an ally of her Republican rival, leading to an investigation by the inspector general of the National Archives.
“The theoretical goal of political campaigns is to educate the public, to help them decide between the candidates. On that basis, this campaign is failing miserably,” he observed.
While Cassino said he likes to think that no one sets out to run a nasty campaign, he acknowledges that a fight can get out of hand.
“You see the other side stretching the truth, so you do it a little more, then they do it a little more,” he said. “And soon, you find yourself accusing your opponent of being a mass murderer.”
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