Inquirer sues former columnist Stu Bykofsky, saying he violated disparagement ban

The parent company of The Inquirer has sued a former columnist, saying his criticism of the newspaper violated a non-disparagement clause he agreed to as part of a buyout package given when he retired.

The lawsuit, filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court on June 29, demands that Stu Bykofsky pay back a $58,738 buyout and pay unspecified damages for his actions after he was criticized by a colleague at a gathering in the newsroom to mark his last day in July 2019.

In 2020, Bykofsky sued The Inquirer’s parent company and architecture critic and Pulitzer Prize-winner Inga Saffron for defamation after she said publicly, among other negative remarks about him during the roast-style send-off, that Bykofsky’s journalism included an “infamous column about his taste for child prostitutes in Thailand.”

She was referring to a 2011 Bykofsky column in the Daily News, The Inquirer’s sister paper, about a trip to Thailand. “If the No. 1 industry isn’t catering to sexual tourists, I don’t know what is,” Bykofsky wrote. “Prostitution is terrible; poverty may be worse.”

Bykofsky, 80, wrote for the Daily News and the broadsheet Inquirer for 47 years, mainly for the tabloid.

In the new suit, the filing of which was first reported Tuesday by the Legal Intelligencer, the Philadelphia Inquirer LLC notes that Bykofsky’s girlfriend shot video footage of the barbed exchanges between Saffron and Bykofsky and that Bykofsky then gave the video to Philadelphia Magazine. The magazine later posted footage of the confrontation.

Mark Schwartz, a lawyer for Bykofsky, confirmed Tuesday that his client provided the video shot by his girlfriend to the magazine, but said he was unsure who shot the footage posted online. Schwartz said Bykofsky had to defend his reputation and called the lawsuit “hypocritical” for a news organization.

“What is a beneficiary and exponent of free speech trying to do suing Stu over this?” Schwartz asked. “In other words, the First Amendment is fine for me, but not for thee.”

In court documents recently filed in response to Bykofsky’s pending 2020 lawsuit, lawyers for The Inquirer said that Bykofsky, in a deposition, had revealed he had “paid a prostitute in her twenties for sex during his trip to Thailand and later joked about her now being too old for him and about her daughter now being a prostitute, too.” The lawyers said this showed there was merit in Saffron’s criticism.

In a response filed last week, Bykofsky’s lawyers said this conduct in 2011 had no relevance to Saffron’s comments.

Timothy Spreitzer, a spokesperson for the Inquirer LLC, said it would have no comment.

The judge in Bykofsky’s original lawsuit said it may go to trial in October.