Letter to Reveal and Will Evans Page 2
I note that you were told multiple times before you published the article, by both our office and the Indiana Department of Labor (“IDOLâ€), that this allegation was false, yet you published it anyway. These clear and unequivocal denials should have been red flags for you, causing you to prudently pause to re-evaluate whether Mr. Stallone was being truthful.
You have produced nothing else, as shown by your reporting, to support Mr. Stallone’s sensational claim. Before publishing your article, what probing questions, if any, did you ask Mr. Stallone in an effort to verify his claim? For example, did you ask Mr. Stallone to identify other IDOL employees who would have, or should have, seen Governor Holcomb at IDOL’s offices (where he claims this meeting occurred) so you could talk with them about this? When a high-profile, well-known figure like a governor of a state walks into a state government office, people notice and remember it. Did you ask Mr. Stallone to identify fellow employees or others that he told about this purported meeting so that you could talk with them in order to verify it? Mr. Stallone would be a truly rare person if he was pressured by a governor, as he alleged, and yet didn’t tell anyone else about it.
In addition, I note your article, when talking about the alleged meeting with Governor Holcomb, says that it occurred “[s]ome days after the conference call with Amazon officials.†Nowhere do you say precisely when this meeting supposedly occurred. You seem to have no problem citing precise dates for other key events in your story, but you don’t cite the time or date of the meeting in question. If Mr. Stallone did not, or could not, give you a precise time and date of that meeting, that is yet another red flag that should have caused you concern, as it is hard to believe anyone would forget exactly when such a remarkable meeting occurred. I note that our office has asked you for the specific time and date that Mr. Stallone claims this meeting occurred so we can further prove our denials by showing where Governor Holcomb was at that time (for example, the governor might have been giving a speech or been out of the State at the time), but all you’ve given us, in response, is a vague approximation of the time of the alleged meeting as being somewhere between November 20–December 6.
2. Mr. Stallone claims that he resigned. The truth is that he was fired for poor work performance that began long before the tragic death of Mr. Terry. Why is that important? Because it’s not unusual for people who have been fired to harbor ill will toward their former employers, and some even look for ways to get even. The fact that he was fired calls into question Mr. Stallone’s credibility, motivations and bias – something you apparently didn’texplore despite the red flags mentioned above. Had you investigated Mr. Stallone’s employment history and status with the State, either by asking him to provide you with his personnel file or requesting the publicly-available information about him from the Indiana State Personnel Department, you would have learned of his firing and could have taken that into proper consideration before publishing your article.
3. Mr. Stallone claims he wanted to issue eight safety citations. In conversations with the Indiana Department of Labor (“IDOLâ€) before publication of your article, you stated that Mr. Stallone claimed he wanted eight citations and received pushback from his superior over
