YES! Weekly just received the complaint the city filed Jan. 29 to try and prevent us from publishing information the city gave us in several public-records requests. You can read it in its entirety here. Not only did they want to stop us from distributing it, but they wanted us to pay their attorney fees for filing the temporary restraining order against us.
The most glaring error in the complaint: Wombo3 LLC, the entity named in the complaint, is not connected to YES! Weekly. Publisher Charles Womack confirmed that Wombo3 LLC is a separate business venture (in a different industry altogether) and that the paper is run under Womack Newspapers Inc.
Some smaller errors: The complaint states that the information was provided to the paper on Dec. 7, when the requests were actually turned over periodically from October 2012 through Jan, 23, 2013. The "HIVE" request has still not been provided to us, and the "Downtown Greensboro" search was for a separate article. One request should read "mkay5507@gmail.com" and not "mk5507@gmail" — an e-mail address of Councilwoman Marikay Abuzuaiter.
The judge denied the city's request but we don't have a copy of his denial yet. The city was most likely shot down because the issue of prior restraint has been thoroughly adjudicated after a 1971 Supreme Court ruling in the case New York Times vs. the United States, commonly known as the "Pentagon Papers" case. Read more about this issue in the Feb. 6 issue of YES! Weekly.
We also now have copies of their explanation for why the hearing was ex parte — meaning without anyone present representing the paper and without notifying us of the hearing — which boiled down to a lack of time (they filed the request Tuesday night and we distribute on Wednesday mornings) and because they asserted we would act to publish the information immediately if we knew they were trying to stop us from doing so.
