A short but piercing piece in the Daily News:
Former Teachers Union president Randi Weingarten went to bat for her successor Sunday after a lawsuit charged that when he was a teacher, he had sex on school premises with a guidance counselor.
The suit claims that the United Federation of Teachers made labor concessions to the city to cover up the incident involving Michael Mulgrew, now UFT boss.
“We live in a country where people are allowed to file crazy lawsuits,” Weingarten, now head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.
In his suit, Andrew Ostrowsky, a math teacher in Queens, claims that Mulgrew got caught in flagrante with Emelina Camacho-Mendez in a wood-shop classroom at Brooklyn’s William E. Grady High School.
…
Mulgrew said the suit “features false and absurd claims.” Ostrowsky’s lawyer Joy Hochstadt was previously fined $10,000 by a Brooklyn judge for making “claims without any substantive legal basis,” records show. — Rachel Monahan.
Aside from the peculiar claim and the weirdness of the claimant (I mean, in legalese, why does this guy think he has standing?), the two main things to get from this are Weingarten’s succinct and ever-so-true statement — “We live in a country where people are allowed to file crazy lawsuits” — and “Ostrowsky’s lawyer Joy Hochstadt was previously fined $10,000 by a Brooklyn judge for making ‘claims without any substantive legal basis,’ records show.”
I think that such a judge’s fine is pretty unusual and does not bode well for this lawsuit or its lawyer.