Former state GOP head declares he is not a racist or a bigot, sues Baker-aligned Republicans he claims falsely said he is

Former Massachusetts GOP Chairman Jim Lyons today sued several people who supported his arch-nemesis, Charlie Baker, for defamation for what he says was a multi-year campaign to paint him as a racist who particularly hated Asian-Americans.

Lyons called that absurd and harmful in his complaint, filed in Suffolk Superior Court against Jim Conroy, Brian Wynne, Matthew Sisk, Mark Steffen, Sean Powers and Ben Maroon.

Conroy helped run Baker's 2014 election campaign and his 2018 re-election campaign. Wynne worked on Baker's 2018 campaign as well. Powers served as Baker's driver in his unsuccessful 2010 campaign and oversaw his 2015 inauguration festivities. Sisk was a pro-Baker member of the Republican State Committee after Lyons took over - and was one of two committee members that Lyons paid a detective to investigate, along with Maura Healey's sex life. Steffen, whose name the complaint misspells, ran Anthony Amore's unsuccessful campaign for state auditor last year.

The complaint also mentions, but not as a defendant, one-time perennial Boston candidate Doug Bennett, now an attorney, who has done work for Republicans in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But that could be because Lyons sued Bennett for defamation separately in Essex Superior Court in 2021. That case has yet to come to trial; just last month, Bennett moved to try to quash depositions Lyons is seeking for a number of his Republican enemies, including several he sued today.

Also unnamed: Ron Kaufman, longtime member of the Republican National Committee from Massachusetts, who a year ago Lyons called the ringleader of the effort against him.

In today's complaint, Lyons charged that Wynne, a political consultant, organized a company called Red Massachusetts Grassroots LLC, three months after Lyons, a newly defeated state rep, won election as party chairman in 2019, with the goal of defaming him.

According to its incorporation papers with the Secretary of State's office, the company stated a goal "to provide strategic political consulting and campaign management services." However, the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance shows no payments from campaigns to the company from the time it was formed to the time it filed for dissolution on July 11, 2022. In the fall elections that year, enough non-Lyons backers won election to the state committee to force out Lyons, a Ted-Cruz-turned-Donald-Trump supporter.

The complaint alleges the campaign of what Lyons calls "the Team" who ran Red Massachusetts and with legal counsel from Bennett, reached a climax in April, 2021, when, he alleges, his haters convinced the Globe to run a story headlined "Asian American Republicans accuse state GOP of pursuing discriminatory scheme to disenfranchise them in party elections." Or as the complaint puts it:

On or about April 19, 2021, The Team implemented a plan to defame the plaintiff by publicizing a false narrative that the plaintiff was a racist, a bigot and anti-Asian, all in an effort to destroy Mr. Lyon's reputation. ... On or about April 26, 2021, this false narrative was released to the Boston Globe to be distributed to the public.

The story referenced complaints by two dozen Asian-American Republicans across the state and referenced the way Lyons disbanded ward committees in a Boston district that runs from Fields Corner, which has a large Vietnamese-American community, into South Boston.

In his complaint, Lyons says he had little choice to dissolve the Ward 15 committee because:

[I]t was discovered that the residences of individuals listed in the ward formation forms failed to match the addresses that were listed in the sworn documents that were submitted to the Office of [sic] Campaign and Political Finance. Upon review it was discovered that the mailings had a return address under the name of the defendant Mark Steffen.

Also that year, the Republican State Committee under Lyons spent roughly $3,700 to support Boston City Council candidate Donnie Palmer, who accused then mayoral candidate Michelle Wu of being a stooge of virus-spreading Chinese communists who wanted to colonize the city - and said that she and US Rep. Ayanna Pressley were Chicago "gangsters." Palmer came in 14th out of 17 candidates for four open seats in the preliminary election.

Lyons is seeking a jury trial at which to prove he's been defamed, for which he is demanding a court order making his enemies retract all the bad things they said about him, plus damages, costs and interest.

As a result of the defamation by the defendants, the plaintiff has been harmed financially and personally and has been held in low esteem by the public who heard or read the defamatory statements orchestrated by the defendants.