Joyce Griggs Corrects Me and Speaks of New Travails
Distractions, Infractions, and Subtle Retractions
A FEW CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS ABOUT JOYCE GRIGGS
Joyce called me last night, and asked,, “Why’d you put that in there about steamy affairs,” she paused for emphasis, “with White Officers and Black businessmen?” She was referring to the article I posted April 17. I thought she would like the piece, and she did, for the most part. But she corrected my mis-statement about her love life, for which I want to apologize.
My response to her query, “because I thought they were true!” elicited a strong negation by the estimable Ms. Griggs. I had misunderstood and put in a different context than she intended comments about “wild times” and “close friendships,” and some of the soldier girl photos sent my imagination to inaccurate conclusions. I apologized to her, and I want to apologize, vociferously, to my readers as well.
I’m doing all this reporting, not on a shoestring, but on a spider web strand. There’s no budget, no apparent market at the moment, and I haven’t attracted an agent, drat!! Follow-up questions, fact checking, getting every detail right(just read the ‘corrections’ page of any paper)is difficult even with plenty of dough. Still, I’m the responsible one here, I screwed up and printed incorrect data. Apologies and mea culpa, and I’ll hope for both forgiveness and greater perspicacity in the future.
Joyce’s story, meanwhile, has taken a bizarre and twisted turn. As I mentioned in posts about other regional stories, she has been battling a disbarment action from the State Bar of Georgia that flowed out of her “voluntary resignation” of her license to practice in Federal Court, right after she ran a grassroots hyper-minimalist Congressional campaign against Republican stalwart Jack Kingston, a battle in which she got close to 40% of the vote in spite of a 17:1 spending deficit and all the White-owned media in the district endorsing Kingston.
She was suffering from Lupus at the time, literally fighting for her life---in and out of the hospital---and she was at a physical and psychological low when she signed the papers that the Feds put in front of her. The substance of their allegations---they had obtained three client affidavits against her and she had been late fewer than ten times for meetings and filings and like matters---turned out, when she investigated things after she was relatively healthy again, to be flimsy and trivial at best.
She has an affidavit from one of the men, who accused her of ‘bad lawyering’ in Federal documents, indicating that the Feds practiced extortion in obtaining his testimony, threatening him with jail unless he “signed the document against Attorney Griggs.” Asked if the Assistant Prosecutor who interrogated him had sought perjured testimony, he replied, “Oh absolutely, as long as I said something bad about Ms. Griggs.” Joyce has a verbal affirmation of similar methods from another of the original trio, and she has yet to find the third person who affirmed that she had ‘abandoned’ or otherwise ill served them.
Meanwhile, she is planning her Federal appeals strategy and waiting, the tragedy of her disfranchisement in this fashion, that Black people, poor people, and environmental and social justice cases in South Georgia frequently go begging. “They made an example of Joyce, so other attorneys would back down from” the sorts of aggressive tactics Joyce had become famous for using on behalf of her clients, said one State Representative who asked to remain anonymous. “The whole situation in Federal Court is just awful, they’re so against you if you’re Black it’s not funny.”
Joyce was a winning lawyer. She was a winner both because of her legal insight and because of her negotiating strategies and abilities. She is still a leader in South Georgia, and she’s not going away. “They’ll wish they had never done this to me,” she chuckles as she speaks. “If they thought I was off-the-chain before, just watch. They haven’t seen nothing yet.” With the world’s attention focused on this ‘Iron Triangle’ region of the world, as G-8 gets ready to unfold here, Joyce’s leadership could be more important than ever.
Stay tuned, and as I always say, though I welcome necessary corrections and modifications and apologize again for not being completely accurate(sometimes it’s fiction, of course, what I write, but not generally!!), “THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!!”