Evidence unveiled Tuesday in federal court showed St. John the Baptist Parish President Jaclyn Hotard’s family stood to make money from a land deal she helped facilitate through rezoning efforts. But Hotard testified that she was unaware of the connection at the time.
In the second trial day of a First Amendment case filed against Hotard and the parish by environmental activist Joy Banner, the jury heard witness testimony and saw text messages showing that Hotard maintained frequent communications about the zoning matter with her mother-in-law, Darla Gaudet, who owned several tracts of land within the proposed site of a now-defunct industrial grain terminal that Greenfield LLC was planning to build in Wallace, a historically Black community in the parish. Jurors also learned that Hotard’s husband had a financial interest in the deal.
Hotard and the parish were in negotiations with Greenfield as the company sought land, permits and public incentives to build the grain terminal, but before the company could begin construction, the parish council needed to rezone the land from residential to heavy industrial. Hotard personally signed the application for Greenfield, testifying she was following direction from the parish council.
Testifying from the witness stand Tuesday, Gaudet admitted that she would have benefited financially if the rezoning was approved. She acknowledged that her land, which she owns through her family business, was of particular value to Greenfield because it contained a railroad spur the company needed for its operations.
“I’m not the only business in St. John the Baptist Parish that would’ve benefited from it,” Gaudet said, suggesting many other people had financial interests in the deal.
Gaudet admitted that her son, Russell Gaudet, who married Hotard in 2019, is the beneficiary of a family trust that owns the land, but she said his share of the trust is only about 8.3%.
Gaudet’s land and the other parcels that made up the proposed Greenfield site have been at the center of a zoning issue that dates back decades. Under questioning from Hotard’s defense lawyers, Gaudet pointed out that her land was zoned as industrial when she originally purchased it in 2013. She also said her son, Hotard’s husband, won’t receive the land until she dies.
Later in Tuesday’s proceedings, Hotard took the stand in her own defense and said she was unaware that her husband was a beneficiary of the trust.
“We just married five years ago. … We don’t discuss his family’s business at all,” she said.
Banner claims free speech violation
While Hotard’s financial interests are not directly on trial in the lawsuit, they form the basis of the free speech dispute that is on trial before U.S. District Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown in New Orleans federal court. Jury deliberations are expected to begin Wednesday.
The dispute arose from a parish council meeting on Nov. 28, 2023, at which Wallace resident Joy Banner sought to inform the parish council members about Hotard’s family land trust and an ethics complaint she filed with the state on the matter about a month prior. Specifically, Banner tried to speak against an item that Hotard had placed on the meeting’s agenda authorizing the parish council to hire an attorney to defend her in the ethics investigation.
Video of that council meeting was played in court Monday. It showed that when Banner tried to comment about the hiring of an attorney, Hotard interrupted her. Parish Councilmember Michael Wright, who was the chairman of the council at the time, joined Hotard, banging his gavel each time Banner tried to speak and reading aloud from a state law he said prohibited the public disclosure of information from an ethics investigation.
A federal judge ruled in 2014 that the statute in question was unconstitutional. Wright testified that he wasn’t aware of that ruling and didn’t notice a note at the top of the statute marking it as unconstitutional.
Banner’s lawsuit claims Hotard and Wright violated her First Amendment rights at the meeting. She is asking the court to declare that Hotard and Wright’s actions were illegal and to void the council vote authorizing legal representation for Hotard.
But attorneys for the parish asserted in court Tuesday that Hotard and Wright felt they had a duty to stop Banner’s comments because they believed she was breaking the law by talking about the ethics complaint.
“She was getting off topic and speaking about an ethics complaint that to my understanding was confidential,” Wright said from the witness stand.
Defense attorneys showed the jury letters and documents the Louisiana Board of Ethics sent to Hotard and Banner stamped with the word “CONFIDENTIAL.”
Mallory Guillot, a staff attorney for the Louisiana Board of Ethics who handled the complaint against Hotard, testified that the confidentiality restrictions apply only to the members and staff of the Ethics Board, not to the general public. Under cross examination, Guillot said the investigation found Hotard committed no ethics violations but could not elaborate because Brown limited testimony about the ethics findings.
Jury sees text messages
The first half of Tuesday’s proceedings were dominated by text message evidence, which the plaintiffs unsuccessfully fought to keep private, that revealed Hotard kept her mother-in-law informed about matters involving the Greenfield rezoning brought to the parish council. In one instance, Hotard offered to text her a “play by play” of an April 9, 2024 meeting where the council voted to rezone the land. Gaudet then texted, “Thank goodness,” upon learning the council’s rezoning vote passed.
The plaintiffs showed several other text messages to the jury in which the women spoke disparagingly about Banner — a prominent opponent of the Greenfield grain terminal project, which was terminated last year. In an exchange dated Oct. 16, 2023, Hotard texted Gaudet: “I wanted to choke that woman!”
In her testimony Tuesday, Gaudet claimed Hotard could have been speaking about someone else. However, Banner’s lawyer confronted her with her testimony from an earlier deposition in which she said she believed it was Banner that Hotard wanted to choke.
About two weeks later, Hotard texted her mother-in-law a news article that detailed the ethics complaint and told Gaudet that she instructed someone from the parish to cancel all advertising with the newspaper.
The Defense
Attorney Ike Spears, who is representing Hotard, argued that, rather than attempting to stifle Banner’s free speech, the council was simply trying to keep the meeting orderly. Spears said that Banner refused to follow the parish’s rules on public comments during council meetings.
Wright and other defense witnesses said it has long been the rule at council meetings to only allow the public to speak specifically about agenda items. But under questioning from Banner’s attorney William Most, Wright acknowledged that the council never formally adopted such a rule.
The defense also pushed back against the ethics allegations, saying that not only was Hotard unaware that her family could stand to benefit from the zoning change, but her involvement in moving the matter forward was simply part of her job as parish president.
In her testimony, Hotard said she was only following the direction of the council members when she signed the rezoning application for the Greenfield site.
In response, Most pointed again to Hotard’s text messages and her attempts to keep them out of the court record. Most showed a July court filing from Hotard claiming no such communications existed.
When the plaintiffs finally managed to unearth them, last month, Most accused Hotard of perjury and asked Brown to sanction her.
Brown denied the motion last week, saying that the matter was moot because Gaudet has now provided the relevant communications and Hotard has been deposed by the plaintiffs since the texts were made public.
Attorneys for both sides presented their closing arguments on Wednesday (Jan. 29) and the jury is in deliberation. A verdict is expected on Wednesday.