McCaw Warpath Leads to Small Business
Highlights Hair Salon Threatened with Letter from Wendy McCaw's Attorney Barry Cappello
It appears that News-Press employees, City Hall,
The Indy, Vanity Fair, the American
Journalism Review, the Teamsters, public access laws, and
former boyfriends are no longer the only ones being targeted by
Wendy McCaw on her legal brief-lined warpath. 
Now Santa Barbara’s small business
owners are under attack: McCaw’s hired bulldog/superstar lawyer
Barry Cappello is now sending intimidating letters to
stores who post anti-Wendy signs in their windows.
In
Cappello’s December 13 letter addressed to “Highlight Hair
Salon” (come on Barry, it’s Highlights, with an “s”!), the store’s owner is told to
remove the “McCaw, Obey the Law” poster from the window. 
The legal logic is that the sign
implies McCaw is violating the law, which she believes is not true,
and that makes it defamatory. Writes Cappello, “California law
prohibits any false and unprivileged publication that exposes a
person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy and injures them
in respect to their business and occupation.”
It seems that charges of hatred, contempt, and ridicule might
better describe his client than the poor little hair salon getting
bullied around by high-priced lawyers. And why a small shop on West
Alamar was targeted first and not the dozens of other stores also
displaying signs closer to the News-Press headquarters
remains a mystery.
