Anna Laurel was livid. The San Diego TV news veteran learned, in December 2021, that KUSI, her former employer, had read her private email on a station computer.
Settlement offer accepted by Anna Laurel. (PDF)“My grandmother’s banana bread recipe … is normally under lock and key,” she said of one email accessed. Her banking and medical information was viewed.
At the time, KUSI owner McKinnon Broadcasting Co. was locked in legal battle with former anchor Sandra Maas in a pay-equity suit she eventually won. KUSI execs suspected Laurel was acting as a “secret agent” for Maas, her friend.
But it wasn’t until July 2023 that Laurel took legal action, suing McKinnon Broadcasting and Stephen Sadler, its chief financial officer who admitted going through Laurel’s personal email account on a newsroom laptop.
Last month, the McKinnons and Sadler offered a cash settlement. After mulling the deal for 15 days, Laurel accepted.
How much is Laurel getting?
“The total amount of $87,850.00, inclusive of all claims, attorneys’ fees and costs, witheach settling party bearing their own costs and attorneys’ fees,” says the defendants’ “compromise offer.”
Josh Pang, one of Laurel’s lawyers, wouldn’t speculate on the offer’s motivations.
“However, it’s important to note that the facts outlined in Anna’s complaint were not disputed by McKinnon Broadcasting Company,” he told Times of San Diego. “The violation of her privacy was significant, and we’re pleased to have helped achieve some measure of justice for her.”
Laurel, who went to work for KFMB/CBS8 in 2022, declined to comment — as did former KUSI CFO Sadler and his attorneys.
But Josh Gruenberg, who represented Laurel as well as Maas, said this week that Laurel was “somewhat forced to accept” the offer because case law allows an employer “to dig into emails” on their own property — the newsroom computer.
The veteran litigator said it was “kind of a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush type of thing,” with the potential Laurel could lose at a once-scheduled April 4 jury trial. “And rather than take the chance, Anna took the money.”
In this kind of case, no state law forces the McKinnons and Sadler — now working as a CPA — to pay attorneys fees (if they lost). Gruenberg’s downtown San Diego firm will collect only a percentage of the $87,000.
Given his team’s 18 months of work, Gruenberg isn’t close to recovering fees and other costs of litigation.
But Gruenberg says: “I am not going to worry about how much money I did or did not make on the Anna Laurel case.”
Although always wanting to be fairly compensated, he says: “The reality is there have been many, many cases over [my] 32 years, where we have worked long and hard and we’ve even secured trial verdicts and the defendants have filed for bankruptcy.”
Despite seeing potentially thousands of hours down the drain sometimes, Gruenberg says he’s had other cases that settled for six or seven figures after a month’s work.
“That is the nature of a contingency fee practice,” he said.
Another wrinkle in the Laurel case: KUSI is no more.
The McKinnon family sold the independent station to Texas-based Nexstar Media Group in September 2023, and Gruenberg said a jury might be hesitant to punish an individual like Sadler instead of a company.
If KUSI still existed as a locally owned station, and case law wasn’t a worry, “I can see a scenario where … it could be a million-dollar verdict just on punitive damages,” Gruenberg said in a phone interview.
Last May, Gruenberg and Maas won a big payday in that KUSI case.
A check for $4.62 million arrived, including $2.38 million for the journalist’s legal team.
But the former owners of KUSI appealed, and want to claw back that cash — a very rare situation, Gruenberg says. Oral arguments are expected in August.
“They know I’m not going anywhere,” he said, “but … you can imagine if I had a client who was not anchored to the community or didn’t have any assets, they would never have done that — because they would never get their money back.”
No matter that appeal’s outcome, Gruenberg says the Laurel case is a cautionary tale.
Employees, he said, shouldn’t use company computers to access private email, “which we know … everybody does, right?”
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