Ammon Bundy-associate is a no-show at Idaho Supreme Court appeal

(CN) — An associate of Idaho anti-government activist Ammon Bundy failed to appear Monday at hearing before the state’s Supreme Court on his appeal of the $52.5 million verdict a jury awarded to St. Luke’s Health System in a defamation lawsuit against the two men and their political organizations.

Diego Rodriguez is representing himself and the court denied his request to appear remotely, Chief Justice Richard Bevan noted at the start of the hearing. Bevan said the court would rely on the briefings he filed to decide his appeal.

The hospital claimed in its lawsuit Rodriguez helped Bundy orchestrate a smear campaign against the hospital and its staff, accusing them of being part of a government conspiracy to kidnap, traffic and kill children.

Bundy and Rodriguez didn’t appear at the trial and had no lawyers present to argue on their behalf, and the jury awarded the hospital $52.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages against the two men and their organizations.

Erik Stidham, an attorney for the hospital and three of its staff members, argued at Monday’s hearing that court should uphold the verdict the jury reached after a nine-day trial.

The hospital’s lawsuit against Bundy and Rodriguez stems from a series of events in March 2022 when Rodriguez’s 10-month grandchild was temporarily removed from his parents and brought to the St. Luke’s hospital in Meridian, Idaho, because the boy was reportedly severely malnourished.

“This infant, had it not received medical care, was at the risk of organ failure or death,” the attorney told the court, adding that one of the doctors found that child resembled babies she had treated in Haiti that were at risk of death from starvation and malnutrition.

Bundy, who was running for Idaho governor at the time, went to the hospital with a group of his supporters to stage a protest, claiming that the child had been kidnapped and demanding his release, according to the hospital in its lawsuit.

Rodriguez — who, according to St. Luke’s, styles himself as a “world-renowned marketing consultant, motivational speaker, religious leader, author, and political activist” — worked for Bundy’s gubernatorial campaign.

“As Rodriguez bragged publicly, defendants wanted to harass and shame the St. Luke’s Parties with claims of child kidnapping and murder such that St. Luke’s employees would be shunned by their families and lose their careers, while St. Luke’s itself would be run out of business,” the hospital said in the complaint filed in Ada County District Court.

The protests and the defamatory statements were part of well coordinated campaign to exploit Rodriguez’s grandchild admission to the hospital in order to drive up donations to Bundy’s political campaign, Stidham said Monday.

“That proof was falsified and lied about in order to start this whole endeavor, and the jury saw and was able to assess for themselves the reality of the situation,” Stidham said.

Bundy, as well as his father Cliven Bundy, initially forced their way onto national headlines after a 2014 Bundy family standoff in Nevada against federal agents. The standoff began after a decades-long dispute between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees and eventually ended with the federal agents backing down after a hotly contested standoff on Bundy’s property.

This would be followed two years later by another standoff, this one led by Ammon Bundy himself, in which armed demonstrators occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, an occupation that sought to protest federal ownership of land that demonstrators believed should be locally owned.

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