Delco Politician Slams Vocal Critic With Lawsuit Over Facebook Post
It's the 25-year-old councilmember versus a 66-year-old grandma.
Left: Upper Darby elected official Noah Fields (photo via official Upper Darby government site) | Right: Delco resident Shellie Siegel Hoyt Zollo, the woman he is suing (photo courtesy Shellie Siegel Hoyt Zollo)
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Politicians have been filing lots of lawsuits these days. Just look to the White House, where Donald Trump has filed suits against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC in the last year alone. And now, an Upper Darby politician has filed a lawsuit of his own — but not against a media outlet with a boatload of money. No, he’s suing a 66-year-old Delco grandmother.
Noah Fields, the Upper Darby Township Council vice president, filed his lawsuit in Common Pleas Court against Delco resident Shellie Siegel Hoyt Zollo. It’s currently winding its way through the legal system.
She’s been a loudly vocal critic of local government for many years, long before Fields took office. She attends as many Upper Darby Township Council meetings as she can, and lets her opinions be known. Zollo tells Philly Mag that she’s called Upper Darby Mayor Ed Brown a “cancer” to his face on at least three occasions, and she was part of a plaintiff group that sued the township over how it planned to use an $800,000 grant that was supposed to be for a community arts and education center.
Here’s a bit of what Zollo had to say to Brown at a council meeting last year:
The lawsuit filed by Fields centers on a Facebook post that Zollo made last year, just before the November general election, in which 25-year-old Fields, a Democrat, handily won one of two open at-large council seats. Zollo posted about a minor criminal incident that Fields was allegedly involved in at a Delco church a decade ago.
She says she received an anonymous tip about the matter and then shared it on Facebook, where she routinely posts political opinions and propaganda; while her posts lean to the right, she has also lashed out at Republicans. “I don’t vote blue no matter who, and I don’t vote red because you said,” she says with a laugh.
According to Zollo, she very quickly received a phone call from another Upper Darby politician, telling her that the information she posted came from a sealed juvenile record and that she should delete the post immediately. In an interview with Philly Mag, she said she did just that and claimed the post was only up for 22 minutes.
The lawsuit alleges that Zollo illegally “disseminated a sealed juvenile matter… and falsely asserted that this incident reflects on his character as an adult and community member.” The suit goes on to say that “expunged or sealed records are deemed nonexistent” as far as the law is concerned and that Zollo inaccurately implied “that juvenile allegations — never adjudicated as offenses and legally nullified — reflect ongoing criminality or moral unfitness.”
According to the suit, Fields “was never adjudicated delinquent and never convicted of any offense.” In the complaint, attorney Bryan Lentz describes Zollo’s conduct as “extreme and outrageous, particularly because it involved the dissemination of sealed juvenile information that Pennsylvania law treats as confidential and not subject to public exploitation.”
The Upper Darby Police Department also got involved, since the public shouldn’t have access to a sealed juvenile record. Detectives asked to see Zollo’s phone — she says the information came to her via text — and she turned it over. But the text was nowhere to be found. Zollo says she can’t explain what happened to it. “I don’t understand phones,” she says.
In an interview with Philly Mag, Zollo called Fields a “little pecker” and “fuckface” and said she can’t afford legal representation but that a friend of hers raised money for Zollo to hire a consultant so that she could file her own response to the lawsuit. She intends to represent herself. Lentz declined to comment on behalf of his client.
“I’m not disputing that I posted it,” Zollo says. “I was simply unaware that I shouldn’t have posted it.”
The suit accuses Zollo of public disclosure of private facts, intrusion into the councilmember’s private affairs, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy, assuming Lentz can determine who any alleged co-conspirators might be during the discovery process.
Zollo says she feels like she’s been “set up,” and that the person who sent her the anonymous info did so so that it could result in this very type of action against her. But she says she doesn’t know who would be behind this alleged conspiracy, and that it certainly couldn’t have been Fields himself.
“Noah doesn’t have two brain cells to smack together, let alone concoct a plan like this,” she insists. “But I’m not going to let these people shut me up. Fuck them.”
