My column over at Civil Beat this week revisited a story about pesticide contamination at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe (“Ian Lind: This Ex-Marine’s Wife Has Been ‘SLAPPED’ By The Navy“).

I wrote about this situation back in mid-2014 (“Hawaii Monitor: Contaminated Dirt Triggers Military Housing Lawsuit”) when several families filed suit in U.S. Federal Court in Honolulu over the situation on base, seeking information on the health hazards they had been unable to get directly from their housing managers.

That lawsuit was settled at the beginning of 2016, after the defendants failed to get the case dismissed, and plaintiffs failed to get it certified as a class action.

Now the former defendants–a private-public venture made up of the company that owns and manages residential areas on the Kaneohe base and the U.S. Navy–have become plaintiffs in a defamation lawsuit aimed to shutting up a woman who emerged as on of the most effective advocates for health and safety of base housing.

So when I saw familiar names in a list of recently filed lawsuits, I had to check it out.

It turned out to be a complicated story that took me a while to sort out and write.

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