Difficult ends to personal relationships aren’t usually news, but when the couple involved are Sam Slom, the sole Republican in the Hawaii State Senate, and reporter Malia Zimmerman, the high-profile co-founder of Hawaii Reporter who pushed a conservative spin on news for well over a decade, there’s legitimate public interest in what might otherwise be dismissed as simply gossip.
Zimmerman filed a lawsuit in First Circuit Court two months ago accusing Slom of refusing to follow through with a mutually agreed cash settlement reflecting her share of a Hawaii Kai home where the couple lived together for ten years. The lawsuit argues that Zimmerman should be repaid for what she paid to maintain and improve the property, as well as her share of the mortgage, taxes, and similar expenses for the house in which she was a half-owner as well as half of a politically conservative power couple.
Zimmerman filed her lawsuit on July 2, 2015. It was originally filed pro se, without a lawyer, but she is now represented by Maui attorney Matson Kelley.
And through her attorney, Zimmerman has now asked for a jury trial.
According to Zimmerman’s complaint:
• Zimmerman was divorced with custody of her child when she met Slom. She was 30 years old and Slom was 56.
• When Slom’s divorce was finalized in 2002, Zimmerman says he “offered to be in an exclusive relationship…and to live with her for the rest of their lives.”
• The two went house hunting, and in late 2003 their offer on a 2,392 square foot home in Hawaii Kai was accepted.
• Zimmerman alleges that Slom advised that her name should not be on the deed because her post-divorce credit rating might cause problems getting a mortgage. Slom assured Zimmerman “she would be an equal, equitable owner of the home even though her name would not be not the deed.” Further, Slom assured her that she would inherit the house when he died.
• They lived together in the home from 2003 to 2013.
• Based on Slom’s assurances that she was actually a half-owner of the property, Zimmerman “paid a portion of the mortgage, real property taxes, homeowners’ insurance and other costs of ownership,” the complaint alleges.
• Zimmerman says her sister and brother-in-law invested money in improvements and renovations, adding to the value of “our house.”
• Zimmerman says she used her own funds to paint the house, fix the roof, and retile the front of the house and the back yard area.
• She says she paid $440 per month for a cleaning service, and additional sums for regular cleaning of windows and screens.
• In April 2013, according to the complain, Slom, “then 71 years old, allegedly began having an affair with a 26-year old woman.”
• Slom denied the affair, but in early September 2013, Zimmerman confirmed the new relationship by following Slom to the new girlfriend’s apartment one night. Zimmerman then moved out of the house they had shared.
• Zimmerman says Slom agreed to pay her a cash settlement, but that he later refused to sign the agreement after it had been drafted by her attorney.
The lawsuit is seeking reimbursement for her financial contributions to the property, including “the mortgage, real property taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance, repairs, improvements,” and so on. It also seeks special and general damages, in an amount to be proved at trial.
The lawsuit asks the court to force a sale of the home and a distribution of the proceeds, after reimbursing Zimmerman for her share of the costs over the decade.
Slom’s response, filed by attorney John S. Carroll, denies Zimmerman’s allegations, and says he should be awarded any amounts that he has to spend on his defense.
The detailed description of the couple’s intertwined finances appears to raise conflict of interest concerns about Zimmerman’s reporting on Slom.
Back in 2008, Darryl Huff, then a reporter for KITV, used his blog (no longer online) to blast the many ties between Zimmerman and Hawaii Reporter, on one side, and Slom and his Small Business Hawaii on the other.
The way it works is like an echo chamber. The politician who can’t sell his point of view in the mainstream media finds an ally who sets up a blog that looks like a real news organization. That blog endorses the politician’s opinions and friends and attacks anyone who disagrees. Organizations affiliated with the politician praise the blog for its courage and journalistic enterprise. The politician uses the blog to affirm his arguments. And so on.
To get the whole picture, I’ll have to track back to the reporting, which never disclosed the extent of the personal and financial relationships between Zimmerman, the journalist and owner of Hawaii Reporter, and Slom.
Or maybe some readers will want to do some of the digging. If so, please share.
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Shame goes to our local media for ignoring this well known story for a decade, and still comtinuing to sweep this under the rug. Perhaps Slom was a useful idiot for any lazy reporter’s republican counterpoint.
Wonder if the diversion of hundreds if thousands of dollars of Small Business Hawaii’s funds to Zimmerman that caused SBH’s shutdown will be mentioned. Panos, where are you now? And the R’s wonder why they can’t get anywhere.
How very awkward…
He should resign from office….a 26 year old??? I guess what goes around comes around. For as long as he’s been in office he has offered nothing but a smug and smart ass attitude. I’ve never been a fan of Malia and her hatchet job make believe “news” site but in this case it appears she has been conned by her mentor/lover. Lesson to be learned…when told don’t worry trust me you don’t need this in writing….worry.
Daryll Huff’s blog is gone, but the Wayback Machine captured one sample of it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080517161755/http://darylhuff.wordpress.com/
There’s a post along the lines you mentioned dated May 7, 2008: Hawaii’s Pioneers of the Partisan Blog. I haven’t read further.
“In April 2013, according to the complain, Slom, ‘then 71 years old, allegedly began having an affair with a 26-year old woman.'”
since Malia and Sam are right-wingers, this is supposed to be their own private business. we’re not supposed to judge judgmental people. conservatives have their own method of hiding deep in the closet:
Nov 2013
Senate Minority Leader Sam Slom countered saying the Supreme Court did not “give it’s stamp of approval on same-sex marriages” and challenged the strength of the bill’s religious exemptions.
“It is not positive, and we will see right after this bill is signed into law — attempts by those who do want to go into your face, who are not thinking about loving relationships but how they can defeat somebody else and quell free speech,” Slom described. “People have differences and you can’t legislate morality, you can try — but you can’t do it,” Slom added.
Slom said the bill would have “lasting and serious consequences” on social conduct, small businesses and education — claiming parents would not be able to opt out of “Pono Choices”, a teen pregnancy and STD prevention program that currently touches on homosexuality.
Oct 2013
Senate Minority Leader Sam Slom, the lone Republican in the Senate, said there was no urgency to hold a special session on gay marriage. He said the issue does not compare to previous special sessions on the Hawaii Superferry or the response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Slom, who believes the public should decide the issue through a constitutional amendment, said the vote is not historic. “Hysteric it may be,” he said.
I did just read a little more. Here is a post with a comment/reply by Sam Slom attached.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080517161800/http://darylhuff.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/a-blogging-standard/
thank you for sharing, Larry. based on my own encounters, Sam never left the ’50s. it is far easier for Sam to judge other people than it is to judge himself. but real consequences always remain.
malia, on the other hand, is no princess. she’s a classic case of a fake victim who thrives on going after people. Malia chose Sam. either that, or the Devil made her do it…………….
The conflicts of interest and hypocrisy were so utterly flagrant that the whole thing was mostly just amusing, especially since so much of the “journalism” was simply absurd.
Will the 26-year-old temptress be coming forward to share the spotlight, and are there any employment or financial ties? Hawaii Reporter should get to the bottom of it!
apropos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Persecution
Apart from character assassination and personal remarks here, Malia’s work in several areas has been thorough and unprecedented in Hawaii.
The website is still up, so you can read her articles on human trafficking, for example. The mainstream press never followed up on what she exposed. And there was much they could have investigated.
Why did Castle Hospital allow a farm worker apparently near death to be checked out by his employer so that he could be flown out of the country, where he most likely soon died?
Why is the state unable to regulate pesticide application on those farms that employed foreign labor?
That and a lot more is on Hawaii Reporter. And only on Hawaii Reporter, which speaks badly only of the rest of the media, not of Malia Zimmerman.
Her writing on Fox News is here:
http://www.foxnews.com/archive/malia-zimmerman/index.html
Some of the detail I have not seen elsewhere, and all of the articles are very well crafted.
Why not stop with the personal and consider the professional?
“Why not stop with the personal and consider the professional?”
great question for both Sam & Malia. definitions of the words “personal” and “professional” are often twisted for reasons that are political.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/node/40114
April 2015
“Dubious claims of militant training camps in the Sahara”
Ever since 2004, when a number of senior US State Department and Pentagon officials linked, without any evidence, the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004 to “al-Qaeda groups lurking deep in the Sahara”, stories have appeared intermittently about extremist training camps in the Sahara. The latest, written by Malia Zimmerman and entitled “Terror triumvirate: ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram training together in Mauritania: analysts”, was published by Fox News on 23 March. Within days, the story had gone almost viral, reproduced by hundreds of online news services and bloggers, frequently with dramatic “scare” headlines.
…
If true, that is very alarming. The analysts cited by Fox are the Florida-based Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC), which tracks international extremism and claims to have had a source on the ground in Mauritania.
Fox quotes TRAC’s editorial director Veryan Khan extensively. And her evidence sounds convincing – at least to anyone who does not know Mauritania and the Sahara. Fox says: “At least 80 trainees, recruits from the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe, including France, are known to be training at the camps, according to a TRAC source who visited the camp and obtained documentation.”
…
Khan describes the two camps as being in Mauritania’s “remote eastern region”. However, the picture Fox inserts in its article is a Google Earth picture of the famous Maatamoulana Mosque, which Khan claims to be one of the two training camps.
…
Moreover, Maatamoulana is nowhere near Mauritania’s “remote eastern region”. It is 80 miles from the capital Nouakchott and easily accessible by road – turn right at Boutilimit on the N3 out of Nouakchott and head southwest to Nbak.
As for the second camp, neither Fox nor TRAC make any further reference to its name or location.
Further doubts about the accuracy of the Fox story are revealed in this statement: “Eurasia Review reported in 2011 that Boko Haram leader Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya acknowledged that the terror group’s militants were trained in Mauritania and claimed that Mauritania “exported” Boko Haram to Nigeria.” In fact, neither Eurasia Review nor the author of the original article, Magharebia’s Jemal Oumar (financed by the US Department of Defense), ever made such a statement. That is because Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya was the former president of Mauritania, not the leader of Boko Haram.
…
Such errors and inaccuracies would suggest that neither Fox nor TRAC should be taken as anything more than proponents of scare stories dressed up as research, and no doubt designed to embarrass the Obama administration. An examination of TRAC reveals that it is highly selective in its data collection and referencing, academically sloppy and certainly not “one of the world’s most comprehensive terrorism research centres”, as it claims to be. (See Alex Schmid’s review of TRAC in Perspectives on Terrorism) ……………..
(See Link for more……..)
Geez, It’s a love affair gone bad with a high ranking public official. Hard to ignore the personal issues here. That IS the story.
An oldie from the Advertiser that touches on the business and political ties.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Aug/17/op/FP508170319.html
Posted on: Wednesday, August 17, 2005
VOLCANIC ASH
Gov. Lingle must beware her right flank
By David Shapiro
The political right has never been much of a force in Hawai’i, but there’s an active effort afoot to change that.
Conservatives had clear impact in the 2004 Honolulu mayor’s race and again in this year’s debate on the Akaka bill for Native Hawaiian recognition.
Now, the local right seems to taking aim at moderate Republican Gov. Linda Lingle as she gears up for re-election next year.
The question is whether it’s really a widespread movement, or a just small clique making themselves look big by working through multiple organizations controlled by the same people.
Driving the action is the intertwined trio of Republican state Sen. Sam Slom, two-time Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Richard Rowland and writer Malia Zimmerman.
Slom is president of Small Business Hawaii, where Rowland is a director and Zimmerman has worked as editor of the newsletter.
Rowland is president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a “think tank” that’s become a leading voice against the Akaka bill. Zimmerman is co-founder and vice president, and Slom sits on the advisory board.
Zimmerman is president and editor of Hawaii Reporter, an online journal that shares office space with the Grassroot Institute and lists Small Business Hawaii among its sponsors. Hawaii Reporter regularly publishes Grassroot writings, and Zimmerman does contract writing for the Grassroot Institute.
Zimmerman insists that despite her ties to Small Business Hawaii and the Grassroot Institute, Hawaii Reporter doesn’t take sides on their pet issues such as the transit tax and the Akaka bill and merely tries to stimulate discussion.
It can be a pretty one-sided discussion.
Akaka bill headlines posted on Hawaii Reporter one day last week included: “Aloha, Apartheid,” “U.S. Representatives Document Akaka Bill Concerns,” “Hawaii Does Not Need Another Government Entity,” “Akaka Bill Will Have Negative Impact on Hawaii’s Construction Industry, Economy,” “Separation by Racial, Religious or Ethics Grounds Does Not Work,” and “Land Up for Grabs If the Akaka Bill Passes.”
A 480-word letter by former state Supreme Court Justice Robert Klein disputing a Hawaii Reporter article on the Akaka bill was buried under more than 1,800 words of counterattack with the headline:
“Former Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Makes Outrageous and False Claims About Hawaii Reporter.”
The Grassroot Institute, with rapidly rising donations, claims ties to national conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and Reason Foundation.
On Akaka, the institute engaged Bruce Fein, a conservative Washington attorney, in a successful move to persuade Senate Republicans to thwart a promise by their leaders to bring the measure to a vote by Aug. 7.
Local conservatives also enlisted Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, who obliged by writing articles reprinted in Hawaii Reporter that compared Native Hawaiian rights to South African racism and attacked Lingle, who supports the Akaka bill, as a RINO — Republican in Name Only.
That tied into a campaign by Slom and others to skewer Lingle for failing to stop Democrat initiatives to enact the transit tax, increase Hawai’i’s minimum wage and raise the conveyance tax to pay for affordable housing.
“Betrayal is how most Republican loyalists feel,” Slom said. “Fallout will continue.”
Lingle supporters worry about the kind of fallout mayoral candidate Duke Bainum got in 2004 when Slom boosted Mufi Hannemann with a late endorsement and Zimmerman attacked Bainum’s wife, Jennifer, with an “expose” of an old elder-care dispute that the Bainum camp considered a blatant smear.
In her previous runs for governor, Lingle feared a below-the-belt campaign by Democrats that never materialized.
It would be ironic if it was delivered upon her next year by her own right flank.
Larry, you are much too easily impressed.