Craig Kent, former chief executive officer of U.Va. Health, filed a defamation lawsuit Feb. 23 seeking more than $34 million in damages against the law firm and individual attorneys whose report to the University Board of Visitors preceded his resignation last year. The same attorneys sued Kent in federal court Oct. 3 over allegations of patient harm and financial fraud.
The 50-page complaint, filed in Albemarle County Circuit Court, names Jones Swanson Huddell LLC and its attorneys Gladstone Jones and Lynn Swanson, as well as Charlottesville-based attorney Les Bowers, as defendants. It accuses them of waging a “defamatory campaign” to force Kent out of his position and then leveraging his departure to build a federal lawsuit against him.
“The purpose of Defendants’ campaign was to remove Dr. Kent as the apex leader of U.Va. Health and then capitalize monetarily on his removal, by filing a federal lawsuit that echoes many of the same defamatory accusations and uses Dr. Kent’s ouster to validate them,” the complaint reads…