Unsuccessful 8th District School Board candidate sues winner for defamation over October Facebook post

Unsuccessful Richmond School Board candidate P.H. “Cruz” Sherman is suing victor E.J. “Emmett Jay” Jafari for defamation over statements Jafari posted on Facebook during his campaign that portrayed Sherman as a “One-Man Crimewave” with an extensive criminal background. 

The statements, made on Jafari’s campaign Facebook page Oct. 30 as both men were running for the Southside-based 8th District seat, “were false when made, and [Jafari] knew such statements were false when he made them,” said Sherman in a lawsuit filed in Richmond Circuit Court Dec. 23. “Alternatively, when [Jafari] made the above statements, he acted recklessly in failing to ascertain the truth.” 

Sherman is asking for $2 million in damages as well as court costs, saying Jafari’s allegations harmed both his business and personal reputation, and caused “great humiliation, shame, vilification, exposure to public infamy, scandal, and disgrace.”

A week after the post, in the November election, Jafari beat Sherman by 367 votes, taking 52% of ballots in the district to Sherman’s 47%.

Jafari, a former paralegal, said Sherman’s defamation suit was “totally without merit.” 

“We’ll just wait until the courts come to their conclusions,” he said. 

The Facebook post at the center of the defamation suit describes Sherman as an ex-felon with “an evasive and elusive history” who came to Richmond “after blazing a path from Tennessee clear into Virginia, leaving a trail of residential addresses resembling a homes listing.” 

“With him comes a background of sentences and incarcerations for everything from attempted murder to possessions of illegal avoidance devices, and a host of other offenses,” Jafari wrote in a 2,139-word post that also took aim at 8th District Councilwoman Reva Trammell, community activist Charles Willis and the Richmond Free Press. 

In his lawsuit, Sherman, a longtime employee of Owens & Minor who also owns an Internet radio station and serves as a chaplain for the Richmond Police Department, identifies those statements as false, including them in a list of more than a dozen allegedly “defamatory” claims made by Jafari in the post. 

Sherman does have a criminal record: In 1988, he was convicted of passing bad checks in Memphis, Tennessee, a felony. While on probation, he was also involved in a gang and nearly shot someone, he has said in interviews. But he has characterized the episode as a wakeup call for him to turn his life around and has said those experiences informed his later work as a youth crisis counselor, minister and founder of anti-gun violence group Virginians in Action, which he created after a quadruple shooting at the Bell Atlantic Apartments in 2021.

“I want to teach all the kids: don’t get into trouble from the beginning, but understand it, and look at me as an example,” Sherman previously told The Richmonder. “If you do, that’s not the end of your life, and you can go on to be a productive citizen. You can go on to have a positive impact.” 

This October, Jafari sought to have Sherman disqualified from the ballot on the grounds that when Sherman initially filed a required candidate qualification form with the Richmond registrar, he only listed the year and not the exact date his voting rights had been restored after his felony. A judge later dismissed the petition. 

Sherman’s own defamation suit may have a challenging road ahead. In order to protect political speech, courts set a higher bar for public figures like political candidates to win defamation cases. In a landmark 1964 case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a public official suing for defamation has to prove that the person who issued false information about them did so with “‘actual malice’ — that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” 

Nevertheless, Virginia courts have on occasion ruled defamation occurred in campaigns. 

In 2018, Virginia Beach Circuit Court awarded a City Council candidate $5 million in a defamation case after a local political activist accused her on Facebook of having had sex with her personal trainer in a hospital bathroom before he had surgery — a claim she said was completely false. Two days later, she lost her election.