Sunshine Sentinel

A voter registration worker hired by rapper Kanye West has filed a defamation suit against CNN and a journalist over a report that he alleges wrongly characterized a conviction that dates back more than a decade.

Mark Jacoby, who filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, pleaded guilty in 2009 to one count of misdemeanor charge of voter registration fraud and sentenced to three years' probation.

But Jacoby, who alleges the prosecution was politically motivated, says in an Oct. 28 memo linked to the lawsuit that the charge had nothing to do with his work for the California Republican Party, as CNN and its journalist Sara Murray reported. Both are named as defendants.

The charge related to his registering at a childhood address rather than one he lived in at the time.

In his memo Jacoby recounts that he and his firm, Let the Voters Decide, were hired by West to collect signatures in several states, including Florida. West was a candidate for president.

He was contacted Sept. 3 by Murray via text messages and agreed to be interviewed off the record, according to the suit.

Jacoby says he sent three statements, one relating to Let Voters Decide, another stating the company does not comment on individual clients and a third on the voter registration prosecution.

"Political adversaries often attempt to slander Mr. Jacoby personally due to the fact that he was the subject of a politically motivated public arrest in California years ago on charges that were ultimately reduced to a misdemeanor," according to the memo.

"The facts of the actual charge were that Mr. Jacoby, then a 25-year-old, had registered at a childhood address."

The memo also states that "This years-old misdemeanor charge had nothing to do with any political campaign or voter, Let the Voters Decide, voter registrations, elections or any other matter and any ongoing focus on it is misplaced and irresponsible." This formed part of one of Jacoby's three statements.

Jacoby, however, is taking issue with the statement in the article that he "has previously pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud related to his work for the California Republican Party," the memorandum states.

"Mark Jacoby was never accused of, nor did he plead guilty to, any impropriety related to his work for the California Republican Party," the memo states. "This accusation in the article is patently false."

In a report at the time in the Whittier Daily News, a California publication, the prosecution was described as "odd" by one expert, the memo states. It also clearly detailed that the prosecution had nothing to do with his work for political parties, although Republicans were quoted as saying it was politically motivated.

Jack Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican political strategist, told the publication that Jacoby’s offense is not typically a high priority for the state.

“At the very least, you can say this is odd because it’s not as if he were voting more than once, using a fictitious name or something of that nature,” he said. “Such prosecutions are extremely rare.”

"They really were out to get him for something else,” Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, told the same publication. “Probably what happened is that they heard he was doing registrations improperly and that was the easy [charge] to get.”