Florida chiropractor “Dr. Gary” Kompothecras is suing Bloomberg News, Allstate Insurance and three other defendants on claims of libel, slander and misappropriation of trade secrets.
On Nov. 8, Kompothecras, the wealthy owner of 1-800-ASK-GARY, a medical and legal referral service for auto crash victims, filed a suit in the Sarasota Circuit Court against Bloomberg News stemming from an article it published in 2011.
Citing medical bills provided by patients, the article questioned whether Kompothecras—a longtime donor to the Republican party—and his clinic chain, the Physician's Group, may have based expensive treatments on the depth of patient's insurance coverage.
The article's author, David Armstrong, and two former Physician's Group patients are also named in the lawsuit, which alleges they conspired to slander the chiropractor's business.
According to the Sarasota Herald Tribune , the lawsuit states, “The case arose after extortionists threatened Physicians Group and Dr. Gary Kompothecras that they would destroy their reputations unless they coughed up $3 million.”
The suit implicates that Allstate and Bloomberg conspired with the extortionists “to publish an outlandish hit piece maliciously asserting defamatory lies” against the business in order to close it.
The referral chain has long been simmering in hot water: in October, Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation barred AGIC Inc., an auto insurance company owned by Kompothecras, from writing new policies, alleging that it did not have enough capital to pay for claims.
State Farm sued 1-800-ASK-GARY in July, stating Kompothecras was involved in a fraud scheme that allegedly cost the insurer more than $19 million since 2005.
The referral service called the lawsuit “frivolous and malicious”, and stated that State Farm owed the Physicans Group payment on more than a thousand claims.
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