A blogger who wrote about Kathryn Knott - the Bucks County woman convicted of participating in an attack on a gay couple in Center City in 2014 - has filed a lawsuit against Knott, Knott's father, the Bucks County district attorney and others.
Kathleen O'Donnell, 61, of Norristown, says in her lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia Friday, that her free-speech rights were violated and that she was fired from her job after Bucks detectives went to her workplace in August and asked about her online writings.
Knott, 25, of Southampton, is currently serving a five-to-10-month jail sentence at the Riverside Correctional Facility in Holmesburg after a Philadelphia Common Pleas jury in December convicted her of simple assault and related charges for her participation in the Sept. 11, 2014, attack at 16th and Chancellor Streets.
Two others, Kevin Harrigan, 27, and Philip Williams, 25, both of Bucks County, were also charged. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to probation.
O'Donnell created her blog, which she called a "parody account," under the name "Knotty is a Tramp" on the website Disqus.com on Sept. 26, 2014.
The suit says she was "expressing her opinions and outrage" about the attack on the two gay men at a time when there was intense media scrutiny of Knott, who before the attack, had expressed anti-gay sentiments on social media.
O'Donnell's blog used as a profile picture "an extremely unflattering, publicly available photo" of Knott, which showed her "drinking directly from a large bottle of alcohol with her eyes closed," the lawsuit says.
O'Donnell's lawsuit alleges that Knott learned of the blog, was unhappy about it, told her father, and that he then directed her to complain to the Bucks County District Attorney's Office.
Knott's father, Karl Knott, was at the time the police chief of Chalfont Borough in Bucks County. He is currently a captain at the Central Bucks Regional Police Department.
On Aug. 6, the suit says, two detectives with the Bucks County D.A.'s Office went to O'Donnell's workplace - the Wayne office of Walker Parking Consultants, a parking-consulting and design company.
The detectives, Martin McDonough and Mark Zielinski, first had a private meeting with O'Donnell's boss, James Pudleiner, managing principal at the Wayne office, and told him that O'Donnell posted "harassing comments" about Knott, sometimes from a computer at her work, the lawsuit says.
It says O'Donnell was then brought before the detectives and that she acknowledged operating the "Knotty is a Tramp" account, saying she used it to comment on news items about Knott.
The lawsuit contends the detectives "threatened" O'Donnell, saying that if she continued writing under the username "Knotty is a Tramp" that "she would be arrested for 'fraudulently impersonating Ms. Knott.'"
O'Donnell told the detectives she would not post on the account again.
The lawsuit says that "as a direct result of the visit" by detectives, O'Donnell was fired from her job that same day.
O'Donnell's lawsuit, which also names Bucks County as a defendant, seeks more than $150,000 in compensatory damages and more than $5 million in punitive damages. It contends O'Donnell suffered monetary losses, including the loss of her salary, as well as damage to her reputation and emotional pain.
Efforts to reach Karl Knott at the Central Bucks Regional Police Department on Saturday were not successful.
The suit also names as defendants Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler and the two detectives who went to O'Donnell's workplace.
It contends Heckler directed the detectives to confront O'Donnell at her workplace "in retaliation" for her writings about Kathryn Knott.
Heckler, reached Saturday, said he hadn't yet seen the lawsuit, but was informed about it by a former law clerk of his.
He said he doesn't direct his office's detectives to investigate a matter unless it's something more serious, like a homicide.
He said his detectives were concerned about the blog because it "was perceived as potentially threatening and potentially inciting others" to do something threatening.
"We would not have been looking into the matter unless it involved what we believed to be potentially incriminating behavior," he said.
In the end, he said his office didn't file any charges against O'Donnell because she had agreed to stop writing on the blog.
Heckler also said the fact that Karl Knott was a police chief in Bucks had nothing to do with the detectives' investigation. The district attorney said he "barely" knows Karl Knott and wasn't contacted by him.
"We certainly didn't bully up on her [O'Donnell] because Chief Knott is a police officer and we were looking out for a buddy," Heckler said.
The suit was filed by attorneys Sean Ruppert and Martell Harris of Kraemer, Manes & Associates in Pittsburgh. Asked to see examples of O'Donnell's writings on the blog, Ruppert said Saturday he couldn't release them at this point in the litigation.
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