The District 1 medical examiner has refiled her defamation complaint against two Pensacola funeral home directors who wrote letters to Escambia’s Board of County Commissioners last year accusing the Medical Examiner's Office of multiple issues including the condition of bodies after autopsy being “butchered,” unclean and placed in bags that leak, as well as delays with filing paperwork or listing misleading or inaccurate causes of death.
Dr. Deanna Oleske adamantly denies all accusations and also accuses Escambia County Commissioner Steven Barry of being a "co-conspirator" in the effort to undermine her as medical examiner, although she is not suing him.
The latest filing comes after First Circuit Court Judge Jan Shackelford granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss the lawsuit last month and gave Dr. Deanna Oleske an opportunity to refile with “specific factual allegations” against defendants Jerald Mitchell, director of Pensacola Memorial Gardens and Funeral Home, and Richard Trahan, director of Trahan Family Funeral Home, who Oleske accuses of libel and/or defamation, tortious interference and civil conspiracy.
“This is a case of overt selfishness, greed, and manipulation, and unadulterated and demonstrable defamation, tortious interference, and civil conspiracy to defame and tortiously interfere, by certain Pensacola funeral home directors, Defendants Mitchell and Trahan, against District One’s faithful Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Deanna A. Oleske, M.D.,” wrote Oleske’s attorney, Ryan Andrews, in the complaint.
The complaint recounts in even more detail the allegations that the defendants conspired to defame and falsely accuse the medical examiner of mishandling bodies and other related misdeeds in order to “potentially get Dr. Oleske fired (or at least reprimanded or investigated), and consequently cause enough backlash and flux to cancel or halt (or at least reconsider) the move of the D1MEO further away from Defendants’ businesses and financial interests in Pensacola, to its brand new, more centralized and beneficial location in Milton.”
The funeral home directors deny the claims and have petitioned the court to dismiss the lawsuit.
Oleske claims in the lawsuit that the funeral directors didn’t want the main medical examiner’s office to move from Escambia County to Santa Rosa County. The Medical Examiners Office serves Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties. The lawsuit claims the men knew their letters would be made public and they wanted to tarnish her as acting chief medical examiner to undermine the move.
The complaint details the alleged timeline of events that led to the funeral home directors writing the letters then submitting them to “co-conspirator” Steven Barry, then vice chair of the Escambia Board of County Commissioners, to ensure that they would become public and ultimately make the news. Andrews wrote that the funeral home directors met with Barry at Smokey’s BBQ, a restaurant owned by Barry’s family, on March 3, 2023, “under the guise of an open discussion about how to improve communications and any perceived issues between the funeral home directors and the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office.”
Andrews says the meeting was “calculatedly orchestrated” by Trahan in order to make “disparaging statements about Dr. Oleske, concerning her performance as the Chief Medical Examiner of the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office because of the proposed move of the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office from Pensacola to Milton.” He said it was part of the plan “concocted” to stop the move because it would impact “their financial interests with the potential revenue source from Escambia County for the indigent and unclaimed under the D1MEO’s care.”
“Specifically, the genius plan that the defendants settled upon was to obliterate the otherwise sterling reputation, integrity, qualifications, and performance of Dr. Oleske as the D1MEO’s Chief Medical Examiner, by contriving serious allegations of misconduct against Dr. Oleske and, ideally, causing a bombshell news story to be run about it,” the complaints read.
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Andrews said the defendants knew their statements would reach the news because “their co-conspirator, Steven Barry, acting in his individual capacity but using his power and position as an elected official to obtain a benefit for himself and/or someone else, promised that he could get her $1.5 million funding stripped and get the letters into the news. Sure enough, Defendants got exactly what they wanted (and presumably what the Board of Commissioners of Escambia County wanted, as well).
The complaint states several funeral home directors wrote letters and gave them to Trahan. Trahan then gave them to Barry, according to the lawsuit, who then turned them over to Escambia County Attorney Alison Rogers.
Escambia County Commissioner Jeff Bergosh published excerpts of the letter on his personal blog, which alerted local media outlets to the issue. The News Journal asked at the time who the letters were addressed to at the county and was told they were simply received from the county attorney.
“For Steven Barry’s part of the conspiracy, he bragged to Defendants Trahan and Mitchell that, because the county provided funding to D1MEO, if they wrote letters with their false statements and gave them to Barry, he could ensure that the letters got to the right people and he could have her funding stripped, including specifically for the new D1MEO office,” the lawsuit said. “For his part of the conspiracy, this promise based on the knowingly false statements was a misuse of his public position, a violation of Florida’s ethic’s laws applicable to public employees and elected officials, and specifically a violation of Section 112.313(6). Steven Barry executed his part of the plan when he took receipt of the letters and provide them to County Attorney Allison Rogers."
The suit alleges the Barry’s conduct was in his individual capacity, a statement Escambia County Attorney Allison Rogers confirmed according to the complaint that said when public records requests were made for communications between Trahan and Barry, Rogers asserted that the records were personal records and communications and that they were “not made or received in connection with official County business.”
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The suit also says Trahan “bragged” about orchestrating the “conspiracy” to other funeral home directors saying that he also “got the county involved when he, who received the group’s letters, then submitted the defamatory letters to the ‘County’ (then, Vice Chairman, Steven Barry).”
In April, both the Medical Examiners Commission and Florida Department of Law Enforcement have completed investigations into allegations that the office of District 1 Medical Examiner Dr. Deanna Oleske “butchered” and mishandled bodies during autopsy, and both investigations concluded that the complaints are unfounded based on lack of evidence.
The Medical Examiners Commission review found “a lack of evidence to sustain grounds for discipline” as outlined in state law. In addition, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement determined that a separate investigation into a criminal complaint of “abuse of a dead body,” found there was also “a lack of evidence to show that a criminal violation occurred.”
The lawsuit is seeking damages in excess of $50,000 due to Oleske losing business and revenue as an expert witness and claims she has become “unemployable in a market that is in desperate need of these kinds of highly skilled physicians.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Medical examiner names Escambia Commissioner Steven Barry "co-conspirator" in libel lawsuit
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