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MARION CO., Ill. - As if the Marion County state’s attorney’s race couldn’t get more interesting, a court filing Friday, November 4, just shot the interest factor up a few notches.
On Friday, the Democrat candidate for the office, Stephanie Corum, filed a lawsuit against two people either related to or associated with the Republican candidate, Billy Milner. The nature of the complaint…? It’s a civil action seeking a judgment against Milner’s mom, Judy Milner, 75, and an employee of Billy Milner’s, Carol Jones-Griffin, because, claims Corum, they have been slandering/defaming her, stating to people that Corum was having an affair with another attorney, Timothy Huyett.
How Corum learned of this alleged slander isn’t yet clear, but one thing is: While an individual running for a public office is considered a public person, and citizens can make critical statements about that public person, one type of statement without proof to back it up is off-limits according to Illinois law, and that’d be a claim of “serious sexual misconduct” such as an allegation of child porn, sex with an underage person, having a “loathsome sexually transmitted disease” or, in the instant case, making a claim of a sexual affair.
Exacerbating the situation is the fact that Huyett, who used to be the lead public defender in Marion County, stepped down from that job in 2013 because of a scandal regarding a sexual affair with a client.
Huyett used to be the state's attorney in Logan County. He was censured by the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) after reportedly lying to the agency about the sexual misconduct with a client. He received a 60-day suspension in 2014 over it.
Corum stated in her claim that she had known Huyett since 2009 but had “never engaged in a sexual relationship” with him.
Corum, despite Milner’s assertions to the contrary, has run a clean campaign. He has claimed in followups to the filing of this civil suit on Friday, though, that Corum is engaging in “mudslinging” against him and that this is simply part of that.
Anyone who has read the back page article of the current edition, however, might come to understand that Milner is his own worst enemy.
Milner was arrested in Richland County in July of 2015, cited with DUI and possession of pot and paraphernalia.
In what was a very thorough arrest, well-documented by the two Olney officers who stopped him (after a report of a motorist driving erratically late at night was received), and solid charges based on their report, the whole thing was reduced to a misdemeanor that barely had anything to do with the originally-charged offenses.
None of the rest of us would have been treated so well. And therein lies the problem.
The general public is fed up with there being two sets of laws - one for the haves, like Milner, and one for the have-nots, like us - and mainstream media is so complicit, they either sucked up to Milner as the ostensible state’s-attorney-to-be in Marion or ignored the Richland County matter altogether. And it isn’t that he’s also got a criminal history that contains alcoholism and violence; it’s that he gets a pass under these circumstances, and the people whom he’s represented in his career as a defense counselor do NOT. Mainstream media very carefully tiptoes around this matter, because they “have to live here” (if we had a dime for every time we’ve heard that, well…we’d be sitting on a beach somewhere instead of writing this for you) and they ultimately “have to work with” whomever takes the office.
Mainstream media has gotten so sloppy that they’ve apparently forgotten that the state’s attorney, as well as pretty much everyone else on the taxpayer’s dime, works for US. And that includes people in the media, too. They might make things difficult for a journalist, but in the end we pay THEIR paychecks, not the other way around. And because all the wimpy media in this country don’t want to push the point (apparently, they all want to be “liked”), the public officials aren’t held accountable for what they’re supposed to be doing, so they just don’t do it. And if no one reports on it, well, all the better for them…they can keep behaving badly and nobody will call them on it.
Billy Milner behaved badly last summer; we called him on it, and it has nothing to do with Stephanie Corum or anything she's done or not done. So we hope she prevails, in both her civil suit against Billy’s momma and employee, as well as in the election Tuesday, because we need common sense SOMEWHERE in downstate Illinois, and it might as well start in Marion County.
You can read the article about Milner’s arrest, charges and slap-on-the-wrist by picking up one of our Election Edition 2016 papers at one of these fine vendors, or by clicking this link to get started with an online membership to the e-Edition. Don’t delay; read it TODAY.
