Even before the Jell-O shot took flight, the battle between Dr. Glenn Stewart and the Independent Weekly of Lafayette, La., had been ugly.
It began with an April 2011 story in the Independent Weekly that reported how Stewart, a physician and property developer, used a Louisiana constitutional oddity to pay $42 in property tax in both 2009 and 2010 on a piece of property he’d purchased for $7.1 million and is transforming into an upscale complex called Parc Lafayette.
Stewart then attempted to refine his relationship with the paper via a publicity campaign aimed at the Independent’s co-publisher, Cherry Fisher May. He paid for a series of billboards advertising the fact that May had been charged with OWI (operating while intoxicated) in 2010 and featuring the portrait police had taken of her in the process. Stewart, says Independent Weekly managing editor Walter Pierce, also paid “people from a local homeless shelter” to protest at the paper’s downtown headquarters.
Then came Mardi Gras last week. Stewart entered a float in Lafayette’s annual Independent Parade, an event unaffiliated with the paper. It featured a large cutout of May behind a steering wheel, and a banner on the front that read “CAUTION: FLOAT DRIVEN BY CHERRY FISHER MAY.”
Pierce says someone texted him a picture of the float. The paper’s photographer, Robin May (the sister of co-publisher Steve May, who is married to Cherry Fisher May) was 14 miles away in Grand Coteau, La., on business, so after some phone calls, John St. Julian, who is married to Steve May’s ex-wife, was persuaded to head down to the staging area with his camera equipment.
In time, Erin Fitzgerald approached the float on her own initiative, Pierce says. Fitzgerald, a schoolteacher, is Steve May’s daughter from a previous marriage; St. Julian is her stepfather. Affronted by the depiction of her stepmother, Fitzgerald attempted some unauthorized redecoration of the float by tugging at one of the banners.
At this point, say most accounts of what ensued, the Jell-O shot flew. It hit Fitzgerald in the chest, Pierce says. And then, police say, Fitzgerald developed a black eye in the course of a brief conversation with Stewart. A confrontation between St. Julian and Stewart occurred as well.
After they interviewed Fitzgerald at the hospital, police charged Stewart with second-degree battery.
Independent Weekly closes on Mondays, so the paper was unable to address the incident in print that week, Pierce says. “The story that we put up on Wednesday after his arrest, it got so many hits it crashed our site,” Pierce says. “It’s been the talk of Lafayette.”
And indeed the fracas has chewed up column inches and television time in southern Louisiana. Among the reports: The Lafayette Daily Advertiser published an account that draws heavily on the experience of Fitzgerald’s friend Jeremy Royer. The Shreveport Times called for a ban on provocative floats. Parade organizer Mike Mitchell, who also works for KADN, the Fox-affiliated station in Lafayette, told the Advocate of Baton Rouge that Stewart got his float into the parade by registering it under the name of his development, then showing up with the “additional signage.”
“Something like that won’t happen again because we’re going to tweak the rules,” Mitchell told the paper.
Then there’s an unmissable television report by KATC’s Maddie Garrett, which raises the question of whether Stewart could lose his medical license for not tending to Fitzgerald. The story includes a photo of Stewart, in a mock prison-orange T-shirt, standing over Fitzgerald with his phone, apparently photographing her as she lies on the ground hurt.
Pierce says the paper’s planned final action on this matter is a 1,000-word editorial that will run in this week’s edition. (UPDATED 3/1: Here it is!) “We don’t know what’s going to happen after the editorial comes out Wednesday,” he says. Stewart, he says, has “something wrong with his frontal lobe, clearly.” The paper will ask him to apologize, he says. (Stewart has spurned media requests for comment so far.) “This is like trying to treat a cancer in our community,” Pierce says. “For the greater good we want to get this behind us.”
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