O’Donnell, Capps, Clendenin conspired to smear Whipple, blame GOP chair, lawsuit says
Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, Kansas state Rep. Michael Capps and Wichita City Council member James Clendenin were named as defendants Wednesday in a defamation lawsuit filed by Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple over a false campaign ad in last year’s mayoral election.
“Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell was the driving force behind the conspiracy,” alleges the new court filing by Whipple’s lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Randy Rathbun.
The filing accuses the three officials of conspiring to launch the false ad and when it started to backfire, of hatching a plot to shift blame to Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman Dalton Glasscock.
“We’ll have a response this afternoon,” O’Donnell said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Along with a counter suit.”
Efforts to reach Clendenin and Capps were not immediately successful.
The trio of officials — O’Donnell, Clendenin and Capps — have been confirmed to have played a role in an online attack ad that falsely accused Whipple of sexually harassing college-age female interns when he served as a state representative. Clendenin and O’Donnell have said they raised money but thought the money would be used for billboards.
All the defendants are Republicans, as is former Mayor Jeff Longwell, the intended beneficiary of the attack ad. Whipple is a Democrat.
But until now, the only named defendant in the lawsuit was the video’s producer, Matthew Colborn, a young media entrepreneur who shared an office with Capps and Clendenin.
The new filing details the roles allegedly played by each of the key figures: O’Donnell ran the project and provided false talking points for a script; Capps created an out-of-state shell company to finance the venture; Clendenin was the principal fund-raiser.
The filing also outlines an alleged meeting on Nov. 4, two days before the election, after the falsity of the ad had been established by Eagle reporting and the smear campaign began to crumble.
“During this meeting Capps, Clendenin and O’Donnell concocted a story to blame Dalton Glasscock and Sedgwick County Clerk Kelly Arnold for the hit piece,” the filing says. “As the discussion went forward the conspirators concluded that Arnold had too much support and they would be better off not attempting to implicate him in the hit piece.”
“As the meeting adjourned,” the filing continued, “O’Donnell reminded Capps of what he had learned in politics: Avoid the truth at all expense and just go on the attack,” the filing states.
Hours later, Capps went on a local radio show the John Whitmer Show on talk radio station KNSS and floated the accusation that Glasscock was the mastermind behind the ad.
O’Donnell and Clendenin have previously acknowledged they raised money in an unsuccessful effort to boost the November campaign of former Mayor Jeff Longwell. Both said they did not expect that money to be used for an attack ad, but a series of billboards.
The new filing claims they knew what they were doing.
It cites text traffic about the false ad between O’Donnell and Colborn going back to Oct. 11, five days before the ad was launched on social media including Facebook and YouTube.
It also alleges that Clendenin deleted his text traffic with Colborn to avoid having to turn messages over under the Kansas Open Records Act.
The money for the campaign flowed through a nonprofit charity controlled by Capps — called the Fourth and Long Foundation — the stated purpose of which was to support at-risk student athletes.
The ad in question was launched from behind a shield of anonymity of a New Mexico shell company called “Protect Wichita’s Girls LLC. New Mexico does not require the owners of limited liability companies to disclose their identities.
The filing cites records obtained by subpoena from a Wyoming company that acted as the registered agent for the LLC and alleges that Capps formed the company using a fake name.
“The ‘Ray Manhattan’ that established Protect Wichita Girls LLC does not exist,” the court filing alleged. “This is a fictitious name sometimes used by Michael Capps when he is attempting to hide his identity.”
The ad used paid actresses in silhouette reading a script of accusations that were pulled from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story and urged voters to “Stop Brandon Whipple.” But the accusations were actually made against Republican state senators, not Whipple, a House Democrat.
The court filing alleges that Clendinin bragged to Colborn about the damage the video would do to Whipple and his marriage.
“On Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, Clendenin reached out to Colborn asking him to watch Whipple’s new video and commented that Whipple was ‘Totally making himself look like a community family man . . . he knows it’s coming,” the filing said.
“Clendenin noted that Mrs. Whipple was attempting to look like a ‘happy little supportive wife’ but that this was ‘all about to be blown up,’” the filing continued.
Whipple called the attack ad and the cover-up “diabolical.”
“Really, the whole thing is just sad,” Whipple said. “With Clendenin and O’Donnell — these are people I had worked with in the past on initiatives in south Wichita, and I considered them somewhat friends. But it became clear through some of the information we’ve received in this case that it was beyond politics. It was personal.
“And then they tried to hide their involvement and blame other people. It’s diabolical. It’s sinister to see how much glee some of these people got from trying to cause harm to me and my family.”
The new accusations come three weeks before O’Donnell will stand for re-election on Nov. 3.
O’Donnell tried to get his deposition in the case pushed back until after Election Day.
Senior Judge John Sanders, brought in to oversee the case, ruled O’Donnell would have to testify this month, but ordered Whipple’s legal team not to disclose any of his testimony to the public or in public court filings until further notice.
O’Donnell, whose commission district represents part of southwest Sedgwick County, is being challenged by Democrat Sarah Lopez.
“I wish this was surprising, but unfortunately it’s more of the same with him,” Lopez said. “We see his pattern of behavior and unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to change.”
She said it’s been a problem for the 2nd District.
“He’s been in the seat for four years,” she said. “He spent a lot of time in court for his federal charges and now he’s going to be in court for this. A big chunk of his time has been dedicated to political games and the resulting consequences of those.”
In 2019, O’Donnell was acquitted on federal charges of campaign finance fraud and remaining charges of money laundering were dropped.
Capps and Clendenin are not up for election this year.
Capps ran for re-election but was defeated in the August primary. He’ll be out of office in early January when the new Legislature is sworn in.
Clendenin, a member of the Wichita City Council since 2010, won a re-election bid in 2017 and will be term-limited out office when his current term expires in 2021.
Although the news is reverberating through the political realm, Rathbun said the timing on adding O’Donnell, Clendenin and Capps to the suit was not a political move, but had to be done now to beat a legal deadline.
“The statute of limitation for defamation is one year,” Rathbun said. “This case had to be filed by Friday because the thing dropped a year ago Friday. There’s no magic to the date of the filing, it simply had to be filed before the statute ran.”
Rathbun said O’Donnell likely would have been added to the lawsuit earlier if he hadn’t delayed his deposition.
“I’ve been trying to take O’Donnell’s deposition since clear back in August,” Rathbun said. “I just couldn’t get him to submit to a deposition. I would have liked to file this thing earlier.”
This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 11:32 AM.
