A hearing in Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench, Feb. 10, will be asked to decide whether to include Alberta lawyer Kristine Robidoux and ten other as-yet undisclosed individuals as defendants in a 2008 lawsuit that alleges defamation against Canadian journalist Arthur Kent.
Kent filed the lawsuit in 2008, after the National Post and other news outlets published an article by Don Martin, critical of Kent, who at the time was running for office in Alberta’s 2008 provincial election.
According to court documents, “Martin [revealed] that his confidential source was Kristine Robidoux, Q.C. who was Kent’s official agent during the election campaign.”
In 2010, Kent filed a separate, $3 million lawsuit against Postmedia Network Inc., National Post, Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey and National Post president Gordon Fisher.
In 1994, Kent settled a lawsuit with his former employer NBC, which he had accused of breach of contract, fraud and defamation after he was fired in 1992. Though the amount of the settlement was undisclosed, he subsequently published testimony and evidence in the case in the book Risk and Redemption: Surviving The Network News Wars.
He also reached an undisclosed settlement in 2008 to a lawsuit claiming that the producers of the movie Charlie Wilson’s war used without permission news imagery that Kent himself produced.