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Utah County Commissioner Greg Graves looks at his computer during the commission meeting in Provo on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018.

Evan Cobb, Daily Herald file photo

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From left, Utah County Commissioners Greg Graves, Nathan Ivie, and Bill Lee are seated at the head of the commission chambers in Provo on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018.

Evan Cobb, Daily Herald file photo

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The Utah Court of Appeals, in an opinion filed July 6, kept alive a libel lawsuit filed by former Utah County Commissioner Greg Graves against several former county employees and officials in the wake of unsubstantiated sexual harassment allegations against him.

Judge Michelle M. Christiansen Forster ruled on the lawsuit between Graves and the other members of the commission during his tenure, Bill Lee and Nathan Ivie, along with the employee who filed the sexual harassment claim.

The opinion, which judges Jill Pohlan and Kate Appleby concurred with, said the district court erred in dismissing Graves’ claim against Lee, Ivie and the employee — reversing the dismissal. The district court was correct, the court ruled, in dismissing Graves’ lawsuit against the county.

Pohlan originally heard the case as a member of the Utah Court of Appeals and has since joined the Utah Supreme Court. Efforts by the Daily Herald to contact attorneys for Graves and for the trio of defendants were not immediately successful.

The suit’s origins date back to December 2017 when a report was released showing a Utah County employee filed a sexual harassment allegation against Graves. While releasing the report, which named Graves as the subject, Lee and Ivie called for their colleague to resign.

The investigator’s report detailed habitual threatening behavior, though it was “unable to confirm or deny the various allegations of sexual or suggestive comments and behaviors by Graves,” reads a December 2017 Daily Herald story.

Over the next year, Graves declined to run for reelection, was stopped from becoming chair of the commission and, eventually, claimed that he was slandered and defamed by the employee who filed the claim, suing Utah County, the employee, Lee and Ivie.

Fourth District Judge Robert Lunnen dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice in its entirety in early 2020, writing that “the statements at issue do not constitute actionable defamation as a matter of law owing to the public nature of the suit, which involves a public official.”

In May 2021, the Court of Appeals heard arguments in the suit. Graves argued that the disclosure of the unredacted report by Lee and Ivie “publicly connected Graves’s name” to it.

“We conclude that Graves’s complaints against the Commissioners should have survived the motion to dismiss. Graves asserted that he was a ‘controversial figure’ in local politics and had an ‘often contentious relationship’ with the Commissioners, who wanted to ‘force his resignation,'” Forster wrote. “Thus, Graves’s complaint, when read as a whole, did not merely assert that the Commissioners simply released the (Utah Antidiscrimination and Labor) complaint and the Report in response to a GRAMA request, but that they engaged in additional conduct intended to harm him so as to rid themselves of a political rival.”

Therefore, Forster ruled, the individual suits should not have been dismissed. As for the county suit, the court of appeals ruling focuses primarily on the arguments Graves did not make — specifically, that his claims against Utah County “were not properly presented below or on appeal.”

The issue “of greater consequence” was Graves’ failure to notify the Utah Attorney General’s Office of a constitutional challenge to the Governmental Immunity Act of Utah. Because of this, Forster wrote, the court would decline to address the issue any further. According to the public docket, the rehearing petition is due Thursday.

Graves’ lawsuit names the female Utah County employee who filed the sexual harassment claim. It is the Daily Herald’s editorial policy to not name alleged victims of sexual harassment or abuse.

Since the initial incident, Graves has sought public office twice. He ran for Utah County clerk/auditor in 2021, when Amelia Powers Gardner left the office to assume her seat on the commission, and the county commission in 2022 to unseat Powers Gardner. Ivie was defeated in his 2020 reelection bid for the county commission, losing to Tom Sakievich, and Lee was defeated in his 2022 reelection bid by Brandon Gordon.

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