Former Judge Andrew Napolitano Files Libel Suit Against Accuser

The lawsuit was filed by law firms Clare Locke and Cole Schotz.

Four days after he was hit with a decades-old sexual assault lawsuit, Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano fired back with a libel suit against his accuser.

Napolitano filed the libel suit in the District of New Jersey, and is seeking to transfer the sexual assault case from the Southern District of New York to the Garden State. Napolitano said his accuser, Charles Corbishley, made up the sexual assault story and is trying to extort him.

Napolitano is represented in the libel suit by boutique law firm Clare Locke. That firm convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to reopen Sarah Palin’s libel suit against the New York Times last year. Napolitano has also retained Hackensack firm Cole Schotz.

Napolitano said in his suit that he never had any sexual contact or a private meeting with Corbishley. Napolitano, who was a Superior Court judge in Bergen County when the alleged assault took place in 1988, denied a claim that a now-deceased criminal defense lawyer set up an arrangement in which Corbishley received leniency in exchange for sex.

Corbishley claims he was facing criminal charges when his attorney, Robert Hollis, instructed him to go Napolitano’s home with a snow shovel. Corbishley followed the instructions and was greeted at the home by Napolitano, who instructed him to shovel the driveway. Later, the suit claimed, Napolitano came outside and sexually assaulted Corbishley, who was 20 years old at the time.

But Napolitano’s suit said he did not live in a house with a driveway and a backyard at that time, and instead lived on the 26th floor of a condominium in Hackensack.

“Even though he knew the accusations were demonstrably false, Defendant, both directly and through his attorneys, repeated his fabricated claims by publicizing the scandalous and false sexual assault allegations to numerous media outlets in an attempt to garner publicity for himself and his suit to coerce and oppress Former Judge Napolitano in furtherance of his extortionate scheme,” Napolitano’s suit claims.

Thomas Clare of Clare Locke said in an email, “Mr. Corbishley filed his lawsuit in the wrong venue. In addition to the defamation complaint we filed against Mr. Corbishley today in New Jersey, we also filed today a motion to transfer Mr. Corbishley’s improperly filed New York lawsuit to New Jersey. The courts will take up these threshold jurisdictional issues, and we look forward to vindicating Judge Napolitano in the proper venue.”

Jon Norinsberg, an attorney for Corbishley, called Napolitano’s suit “patently baseless and completely improper. There is already a pending lawsuit in the Southern District of New York dealing with the identical issues. The filing of a second lawsuit, in a different federal forum, violates the ‘first-filed’ rule and warrants complete dismissal.”

In addition, Norinsberg said Napolitano’s claims against Corbishley are “outrageous and completely false. We look forward to exposing the truth of what really happened between Judge Napolitano and Mr. Corbishley, and fully vindicating Mr. Corbishley’s rights in a court of law.”