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The not-so-funny comedy of errors behind the largest libel award in Virginia history
Melinda Semadeni had a minute and a half to fill. It was April 6, 2001, a Friday, and the twenty-six-year-old reporter at WVIR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia, needed a story. At the morning news meeting, someone mentioned Jesse Sheckler.
Sheckler, the forty-nine-year-old owner of a successful garage in nearby Greene County, had been indicted a month earlier along with four other men on a charge of conspiracy to possess cocaine. The Greene County Record, a 3,200-circulation weekly in Stanardsville, the county's only incorporated town, had reported the charges the day before. Reporters in nearby Charlottesville, the largest city in central Virginia with a population of about 45,000, made a habit of watching the Record for tips. Semadeni was assigned to the story.
She could not have known it, but a slow spiral had begun in which a series of mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities would tarnish a young reporter's career, send an innocent man into an emotional tailspin, and produce the largest libel award in Virginia history. The media crowd in this small southern city is still wondering how a straightforward news story became a journalistic cautionary tale.
Home to Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville has an affluent, educated population that cares about local news, and WVIR/Channel 29 has a reputation as a stepping-stone for beginners.
Semadeni had been working at Channel 29 for three months, her first paid reporting job out of Brigham Young University. On this Friday, assignment in hand, she headed north on U.S. 29 to Stanardsville, only a forty-minute drive from Charlottesville though the psychological distance is much greater. If Charlottesville is known for its liberal eccentricity, its laid-back downtown sprinkled with restaurants and coffee shops, Greene County is the polar opposite. Its long-time residents are conservative, with a distrust of outsiders that goes back generations.
Around the same time that Semadeni was driving to Greene County, Jesse Sheckler was on the phone with his attorney. He believed he would be acquitted as soon as the jury heard his side that he had been hoodwinked into making what he thought was an innocent loan to a friend.
When Semadeni got to Stanardsville,...