Allegheny County Courthouse
PITTSBURGH – A former news reporter made to sound like a serial criminal in a strange online article is suing the website that posted it, arguing it is messing with her career.
Tracy West, a former news anchor in Gainesville, Fla., now living in Pittsburgh, said she was close to a new job before a company abruptly shut her out after seeing an article about her on AnswerPrime.com.
Though she had retired to raise her child, the article says she sexually harassed a man, was arrested at a protest and wiretapped the governor of West Virginia. She was also possibly abducted when her car was found abandoned at a mall in Virginia, the article says.
It culminated in grandmothers at her daughter’s school asking how West could be allowed near children after being convicted of a sex crime.
“Due to gossip surrounding the article, West and her daughter have been shunned from social events such as birthday parties,” says her lawsuit, filed this month in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.
“West has been denied employment by several other employers or forced to withdraw her applications as a result of the false statements about West in the article.”
The article “What happened to Tracy West on wjcb tv news?” tells a much different story than West retiring in 2018 to stay at home with her young child. When she attempted to re-enter the workforce this year, the prospective employer stopped the interview process for a community-relations position, and West says an intern there told her it was because of her “legal troubles.”
That information came from the AnswerPrime article. Her reasons for leaving WJCB range from its coverage of President Donald Trump to being fired for sexual harassment, the article claims.
Then prosecutors charged her with recording a phone call with West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey and releasing it during Morrisey’s campaign for U.S. Senate, it claims. Then she was again fired from WJCB, which the article says is located in West Virginia, for a story critical of another Senate candidate, Richard Mourdock, who ran in Indiana six years before West left WJCB.
Ultimately, her car was found abandoned at a mall in Manassas, Va., leading to an FBI investigation into her disappearance, the article claimed.
“West has not ever been to Manassas, Va.,” her lawsuit says. “During the period of the alleged disappearance, West has been at home raising her child.”
AnswerPrime refused to make changes to its article and even removed posts from friends that stated everything in it was a lie, the suit says. After a cease-and-desist letter, AnswerPrime added the part about Mourdock.
West seeks damages for defamation and invasion of privacy. She is represented by Timothy Kolman of Kolman Law.
