Jeb Bush Hires Writer Who Left Paper After Sex-Harassment, Plagiary Charge

By: E&P Staff Just days after Florida Gov. Jeb Bush fired a top official over sexual-harassment allegations, Bush's office confirmed it has hired Lloyd Brown, former editorial-page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, who resigned from the paper in November following public allegations of sexual harassment and plagiarism.

Brown, 65, quit the paper on Nov. 2 after a former editorial writer there, Billee Bussard, wrote an article in the local Folio Weekly that asserted that Brown watched Internet pornography in the paper's office and also conducted sexual conversations on the telephone while viewing the sexual material.

The day Brown quit the newspaper, his publisher, Carl Cannon, wrote that an internal task force had ?found three instances of plagiarism and many other instances of lack of complete attribution? in Brown's editorials, dating back to 1996.

Brown was hired Dec. 20 at an annual salary of $80,000 as a staff writer/speechwriter, according to Jacob DiPietre, a spokesman for Gov. Bush. He said the governor had full faith in Brown and that the governor's firing of Secretary of Elder Affairs Terry White on Wednesday showed Bush would not tolerate sexual harassment.

Brown, he added, had told the governor there were "no merits" to the Bussard allegations. But Bussard said she has received no legal threats "claiming the story was inaccurate from Brown or the Times-Union," according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Bussard, in her article, wrote that she had taken the workplace matter to the paper's human-resources office, and that in August 1998, Brown signed a letter saying that he had sought help with "an outside counselor for his addiction to the Internet and possession of pornography." Bussard quit the Times-Union in 2000.

Brown generated national attention and staff protests in 2000, after writing an editorial that called the era of slavery in the U.S. "merely a small and shrinking part of the human condition." His paper ran a clarification, apologizing for any impressions that the editorial was "insensitive or demeaning."