Amesbury author wins abuse-of-process case against former Maine judge

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A former Maine judge currently suspended from the practice of law lacked a good-faith reason for his filings in a Massachusetts court targeting an Amesbury author who documented the judge’s misdeeds, an Essex County jury has decided.

The legal battle between ex-Maine Probate Court Judge Robert M.A. Nadeau and the author, Nancy Madore, has been previously chronicled on these pages. But to quickly recap …

In spring 2016, Nadeau moved to dismiss his own defamation case against Madore on the eve of trial. That suit focused on two small sections of Madore’s 401-page, self-published book, “The Ethics of Judge Nadeau: A True Story.”

In dismissing the case with prejudice, Superior Court Judge Diane M. Kottmyer made clear she was “not endorsing the grounds set forth in plaintiff’s motion” but rather because “further proceedings would constitute an unwarranted expenditure of the judicial resources of this court.”

A year later, Nadeau returned to court with a new mission: getting a court order to compel Madore to give a deposition in a Maine lawsuit he had filed against York County Probate Court Registrar Carol Lovejoy and her son, Travis, in which Nadeau had claimed that Travis Lovejoy had tampered with his campaign signs.

Nadeau claimed that the sign tampering, rather than his mounting list of ethical woes, had caused him to lose his bid for re-election to the Probate Court bench in November 2016 by more than 4,800 votes, and that Madore had been part of the conspiracy.

On Nov. 17, 2017, Superior Court Judge Elizabeth M. Fahey dismissed Nadeau’s claim with prejudice, too, but allowed Madore’s abuse-of-process counterclaim to survive, and Madore chose to pursue it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, voluminous motion practice ensued, much of it generated by Nadeau. He made an unsuccessful bid to disqualify Fahey from the case.

In denying Nadeau’s motion to compel deposition testimony and document production, Superior Court Judge Salim R. Tabit was moved to write: “The discovery disputes in this case have been interminable, and in this court’s opinion, an attempt of both sides to harass and burden the opposing party, for what appears to be pure sport.”

After a four-day trial in Newburyport from July 16 to 19, a jury returned a verdict in Madore’s favor, awarding her $4,000 (just over $5,000 with interest) on the abuse-of-process claim.

While the damages were modest, Madore’s attorney, Scott F. Gleason of Haverhill, believes his client has once again proven a point by standing up to Nadeau and exposing his behavior.

“Ms. Madore is a hero,” Gleason says. “He’s been flushed out. Everyone knows what and who he is.”

Rather than back down in the face of Nadeau’s familiar abusive tactics, Madore hung in there, Gleason says.

“Closure in immense measure for her occurred when she got on the witness stand and she faced him in all his madness,” he adds.

According to Gleason, the verdict shows the jury believed that Nadeau had an ulterior motive in filing his claim to compel Madore to give a deposition: obtaining ammunition that he could use to sue her in Maine.

In an emailed response to an inquiry from Lawyers Weekly, Nadeau bemoans the fact that Judge Fahey prevented him from introducing evidence indicating that his Massachusetts filing had been backed by three specific orders and a letter rogatory from then-Maine Superior Court Judge Lance E. Walker, now a federal judge.

A New Hampshire Superior Court judge had no problem granting his “simple” request regarding a witness in the Granite State, he notes.

“Why Judge Fahey refused to honor what a Maine justice had requested of her, and what a New Hampshire justice in virtually identical circumstances had no difficulty supporting, has been and remains extremely disappointing, at best,” he writes.

In other ways, too, Fahey “tremendously and very unfairly tied my hands concerning my defense against the abuse of process counterclaim,” he writes.

Nadeau is or will soon be eligible to reclaim his law license in the jurisdictions from which he was suspended for ethical breaches unrelated to Madore. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued an order suspending Nadeau for two years on June 20, 2017. Massachusetts SJC Single Justice Kimberly S. Budd followed suit, ordering a reciprocal 18-month suspension on Oct. 17, 2017, to commence a month later.

Nadeau declines to say whether he plans to seek reinstatement. But Gleason hopes it is the last Massachusetts has seen of the former judge.

“Hopefully, he goes back to Maine and stays up there,” he says.