Community Corner

Stefanonis, Denied by Little League HQ, Pledge Second Defamation Suit

Chris Stefanoni accuses the league of libeling him in a statement to the Darien Times.

Developers Chris and Margaret Stefanoni have pledged to file a second defamation suit against Darien Little League after a series of complaints lodged by the couple were recently dismissed by the organization's Eastern Region Headquarters.

"This is about principle, not money, and I am definitely going to fight them as hard as I can," Stefanoni said in a statement this week.

The dispute , when the Stefanonis say their son was deliberately targeted for "demotion" by the DLL during its Fall Ball program.

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The couple claims that the move was due, in part, to the proximity of the developers' unpopular  to the property of former DLL board member Mark Gregory.

That accusation was emphatically denied and dismissed as "nonsense" by the league in September. Officials have said that the move, in which the boy was placed with younger players than he had competed with in the spring and summer, was due to overcrowding that made it necessary to group participants by grade level instead of age.

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In January, Margaret Stefanoni , alleging that the organization had defamed her by characterizing her as a liar in its public statements on the dispute [read]. In the complaint, she sought a retraction and nominal damages of $1.00.

"The suit is meritless and we expect it will be dismissed," Tom Luz, general counsel for the league, said at the time.

On March 14, Margaret Stefanoni submitted a list of complaints regarding the DLL — many of them reiterated from earlier statements — to Little League's national headquarters in Williamsport [read].

Among them: that her son had been unfairly punished, that the DLL had more coaches than allowed on its board of directors, and that her husband had been banned from coaching "for publicly calling for women and people of color to be added to the 23-member all-white male DLL board."

In a March 29 response [read], Assistant East Region Director Corey M. Wright rejected the charges, stating that the league had received a waiver to have a majority of managers and coaches on its board and that the DLL "simply did not appoint/approve the child's father to a Manager/Coach position" rather than banning him.

But the Stefanonis insist that Luz's statement to the Darien Times — that Stefanoni had been prevented from coaching because of "some incidents that occurred on the field with him that we do not want to get into" — is "degrading and demeaning" because it "leaves open to speculation as to what those incidents might have been that supposedly happened on the baseball field."

And for that, according to Chris Stefanoni, a defamation suit is warranted.

"Of course I'm going to sue the board of directors of Darien Little League," Stefanoni said this week in a statement. "After what they said about me, I don't think they gave me a choice. ... Someone has to stand up to these bullies."

DLL President Tony Farren declined to comment Wednesday on the Stefanonis' statements.


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