St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch is suing political operative Peter Schorsch over a deleted Facebook post claiming Welch cheated on his wife with Stephanie Owens, who later became deputy mayor. Welch says the accusation is false and defamatory.
St. Petersburg’s mayoral race has reached the point where one candidate is suing a political operative over an alleged affair, the operative is talking about anti-SLAPP law and everyone involved has connections to someone else’s campaign. Florida local politics remains undefeated at turning a Facebook post into a full legal ecosystem.
Mayor Ken Welch filed a defamation lawsuit against Florida political operative and publisher Peter Schorsch over a July Facebook post that claimed Welch cheated on his wife with Stephanie Owens. Owens had worked on Welch’s 2021 campaign and later became his deputy mayor.
Welch says the allegation is false. His lawsuit seeks more than $50,000 in damages, requests a jury trial and accuses Schorsch of publishing the claim with actual malice while having political and financial reasons to damage Welch’s reelection campaign.
The affair itself should not be reported as fact because that is literally what the lawsuit is fighting about. Welch denies it happened, and there has been no court finding establishing the allegation as true.
Schorsch does not deny posting the claim. According to reporting from the Tampa Bay Times and Hoodline, he deleted the Facebook post roughly an hour later and has said the deletion undercuts Welch’s claim that he acted with actual malice.
He has also said his lawyers are reviewing Florida’s anti-SLAPP law, which is designed to protect people from lawsuits intended to punish protected speech. In other words, the fight has already progressed from ‘who posted what on Facebook?’ to ‘which side may eventually be asking the other side for attorney fees?’
The politics around Schorsch make the dispute even messier. He volunteers and does paid political work connected to Welch’s opponent, former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, while Schorsch’s wife chairs a political committee supporting Crist’s campaign.
Businesses owned by the Schorsches have also received substantial payments from that committee for campaign-related services. Welch’s lawsuit points to those ties as evidence that Schorsch had incentives to hurt him politically, while Schorsch argues that he does not personally profit from attacking Welch and says the mayor is trying to intimidate a journalist.
Schorsch’s original post was not exactly phrased like a cautious investigative memo. According to screenshots cited in the lawsuit, he challenged Welch to prove him wrong and invited him to take the matter to court and conduct discovery, which is one of those sentences that becomes much more interesting once the other person actually hires a lawyer and does exactly that.
Welch says the case is personal rather than merely electoral. He has said the accusation harmed his family and reputation and insists he would pursue the matter regardless of how the election turns out.
Schorsch says the opposite political motive is at work. He argues that Welch is behind in the mayoral race and is using the lawsuit to cast himself as a victim while trying to chill aggressive coverage and criticism.
Owens has not publicly supplied a new account resolving the allegation. She resigned as deputy mayor in 2022 after separate workplace-bullying allegations, which were unrelated to the affair claim and should not be treated as evidence for it.
That leaves the public with an ugly but legally straightforward dispute. A political operative made a damaging factual claim about a mayor’s marriage, the mayor says it was a lie, and now a court may eventually decide whether the statement was defamatory and whether Schorsch acted with the level of fault required when the plaintiff is a public official.
The timing, just days before the election, ensures both sides will accuse the other of weaponizing the courts or the press. In a less dramatic city, somebody might simply delete the Facebook post and move on; in Florida politics, deletion is apparently just the opening statement.
