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This week’s story about Democratic school board candidate Rick Southerland was a primary-season twist on the classic October surprise: a last-minute tip dropped in a journalist’s lap with little or no time to vet it out.
The story, as best we could report it out, was complicated, disturbing, and sad. Southerland had been living, working, and campaigning with James Osborne, a man with a federal felony conviction for possession of child sexual abuse imagery, who was required to register as a sex offender for 15 years as part of his guilty plea.
Southerland and Osborne offered a detailed explanation for the circumstances leading to the conviction, which both described as unfair. Southerland said he was actually inspired by Osborne, who was abused as a child, and claims to have come into possession of illegal images and videos in the course of searching for recordings of his own abuse. It’s a complex, often convoluted, story, which Southerland and Osborne said drew out a host of issues, from the importance of sex education to flaws in the criminal justice system to society’s failure to offer “rehabilitation, compassion, and second chances.” The story, as you might imagine, has both garnered sympathy and provoked disbelief, even anger.
A lot of those reactions were intensified because Southerland was running for school board in a district that is still haunted by child sex abuse and a long legacy of secrecy — the 'cover-up culture' of New Hanover County Schools, as advocates have put it for years.
Backstory aside, Southerland and Osborne acknowledged that they had discussed the situation and decided against telling the public or the New Hanover County Democratic Party (NHCDP) about it. Months ago, as part of the candidate vetting process, Southerland had been asked directly if there was anything in his private life that could hurt his campaign or the party; Southerland had said no.
After the story broke, Southerland – who had won one of four primary spots by a comfortable margin and was headed to the general – faced rapidly mounting pressure to leave the race. While he was initially defiant, a day later, he said he would withdraw. (And, after some bureaucratic confusion, it became clear that the NHCDP would be able to pick a replacement candidate, which they will likely do with a ‘mini-primary,’ allowing executive committee members to vote on their candidate of choice at their convention on March 21. We'll be keeping an eye on that.)
Note: I don’t assume everyone followed the story this week, although it was pretty widespread. If you want to catch up, here’s the original story, and here’s the follow-up after Southerland stepped down.
With any election story like this, the public is going to have questions — and criticisms — about when and how the story runs, where it came from, and whom it benefits.
In today’s column, I'm fielding questions I received about this reporting, and walking through how the story came together, the timeline and the timing, the issues we wrangled with, and the questions that have so far been left unanswered.
The original tip
At 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Primary Election Day, I got a tip from a source who told me about Osborne’s offender status and that he was living at the same address as Southerland.
Prior to that moment, I had never heard anything about this, not even from the fringe rumor mill. I understand people who are incredulous about that, but it’s the truth. It’s also a little embarrassing, as a journalist, to be caught so off guard – and it’s only cold comfort that so many other people were also apparently blindsided.
Understandably, I’ve had a lot of questions about both the tipster and the timing, which I think is fair. Any campaign-season story deserves that kind of scrutiny and skepticism.
Most people have been respectful of our need to protect the privacy of anonymous sources. But, especially given how politically charged this story is, people want to know something. So, let me say this: In nearly every election, I’ve had people whose political motives are extremely clear when they send me a tip, but this source, though they do probably lean right, has sent me leads for years, and they’ve never really had a partisan bent.
Again, I was struck by this coming from just a single source. Wilmington leaks like a sieve, and it’s pretty common for me to hear about an emerging story from several sources, with varying degrees of detail and accuracy, days, months, even years before we get ahold of something concrete. (More on the ‘who knew what when,’ later.)
The timing itself is also interesting. My source tells me they contacted me right after they found out, though, of course, there are other links in the information chain I probably don’t know about. Still, if this was a partisan hit, the afternoon of Election Day — knowing a story would have to be vetted and reported and might not even come out before polls closed — is an odd choice.
I’ve heard from both Democrats who think Republicans were behind it, and Republicans who think Democrats were behind it, and plenty of theories about the Tuesday-afternoon timing. None of them really holds water for me, given what I know, but I concede that anything’s possible.
Publication timeline
We heard from a few folks who basically asked: if you found out on Tuesday afternoon, why didn’t you publish until Wednesday mid-morning? Why not at least let some Election Day voters know if possible?
If you don’t work in a newsroom, I think that’s a fair question. And the truth is, at one point, we did hope to publish by 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
Here’s a timeline of what happened instead:
- Tuesday, 1:45 p.m. – I got the initial tip, and the newsroom started running down state and federal law enforcement and court records.
- 2:15 p.m. – After substantiating the tip, I called NHCDP chair Jill Hopman and spoke with her briefly. She seemed genuinely shocked, saying, “Everyone loves James.” I told her we’d seen some pretty concrete evidence and were working on a story, so we’d need a statement.
- 2:25 p.m. – I called Southerland and left a message, then texted him, saying we had a time-sensitive story we needed to talk to him about. I didn’t initially say what the story was about, although I suspected he might already know, either from Hopman or because he’d been waiting for someone to come across it.
- 2:30 p.m. – Over the next hour, the newsroom helped me track down additional information, and we wrote up some nut grafs – basically, a few paragraphs laying out the basic information we’d researched so far. We thought we might be able to get the story ready in time for the afternoon broadcast, by around 5 p.m.
- 3:30 p.m. – Since Southerland had read but not responded to my first text, I sent a more direct message, saying we needed to talk to him about Osborne. He responded 15 minutes after that, saying he could speak a little later. I told him we were going to publish at 5 p.m. He called me about ten minutes later, at the urging of Hopman.
- 4 p.m. – Southerland, who also had Osborne on the line, spoke with me for about half an hour. While it was, at times, a tough conversation, I credit them for getting on the phone with a journalist under uncomfortable circumstances.
- 4:30 p.m. – Given the legally complicated story Osborne shared, it seemed clear it would be unethical to push it out at 5 p.m. without more reporting. We pulled the broadcast script. I called Hopman and told her we did need a statement, but that we’ll be publishing in the morning.
- 5:00 p.m. – I went home and, over the next few hours, pulled all of the additional court records that could confirm, deny, or add context to Osborne’s story. At one point, I looked up to see that the election results had finally come in. Southerland had won one of the four primary spots, a further complication to the story.
- 7:30 p.m. – On the phone, Hopman told me a lot of conversations were going on, but it was not exactly clear what the party’s statement would look like. That left some TKTKs (editorial scratch notes for ‘to come’) in the script, and the framing a bit undetermined.
- 10:00 p.m. – As we got into the evening hours, I also heard privately that, behind the scenes, there was mounting alarm and frustration over Southerland’s failure to disclose this story himself. I got a lot of texts and phone calls that night. It became increasingly clear that Democratic leadership, candidates, and elected officials all agreed Southerland needed to step down. Based on that, I had a draft in about as good shape as I thought it could be that night.
- Wednesday, 4:30 a.m. – I woke up, fed the cat, put on coffee, and wrote up the election results for the web and broadcast. Then I turned back to the draft and tried to clean it up the best I could with fresh eyes.
- 8:20 a.m. – Hopman sent the statement, which did, in fact, call for Southerland to step down. I texted Southerland to ask for a comment on that.
- 8:30 a.m. – At this point, the story had evolved from Tuesday’s tip, to a call for Southerland to resign, and could evolve further depending on Southerland’s response. I decided to lock in the basic structure and framing, and had my colleagues Rachel Keith and Kelly Kenoyer take a look and give some notes.
- 9:17 a.m – Southerland texted back to say no one had directly asked him to step down. I passed the gist of the party’s statement along to him, but he held his ground, saying he “won’t be bullied.”
- 10:11 a.m. – We made some final tweaks based on Keith and Kenoyer’s comments and then published.
After we published the story, it took on a life of its own, and it was another intense 24 hours.
- Wednesday, 10:50 a.m. – Port City Daily asked to republish the story, followed by WECT about an hour later. By noon, it was everywhere. New Hanover County Commissioner Stephanie Walker, who had supported Southerland, was the first to join NHCDP’s call for Southerland to step down, I think. A half-dozen other candidates and elected officials followed suit over the next 12 hours. Judging by the comment sections, there were some people sympathetic to Osborne’s story, but almost no one supported Southerland’s decision not to tell the party or the public about it, and I didn’t see a single person supporting his decision to stay in the race.
- 7:00 p.m. – Connor Smith at WECT did a follow-up, talking to Southerland, who remains defiant, saying he’s done nothing wrong and will stay in the race. Defending his decision not to disclose anything to the party, Southerland compared his campaign to Hillary Clinton’s, saying she ran on her record, not her husband’s. “This parallels that same story,” he said. Public reaction to Southerland’s refusal to step down remained incredulous and negative.
- Thursday, 8:12 a.m – Southerland texted me a statement, announcing he would withdraw from the race, while also broadly criticizing the public reaction to the story.
Ethical and editorial debates
Any story can be fraught, more so during an election, and especially when you’re talking about serious allegations. It helps to have a newsroom with diverse opinions, because while there’s never a good time for groupthink, this could be truly disastrous.
The first question was: Is the tip, if true, a worthwhile story?
We’ve had many healthy newsroom debates about what rises to the level of a story – again, especially when you’re talking about an election where the reporting can effectively put a finger on the scale.
There’s no hard and fast rule, but in general, we think about severity, timeliness, and context. A misdemeanor public drunkenness charge from 15 years ago? Probably not. A domestic violence charge from last year? Almost definitely. A questionable business decision five years ago? Maybe – depending on whether it was part of a pattern, or could cause an ongoing conflict of interest. In this case, based on the initial information, we all thought it was clearly a story.
The next question was: Given the timing, should we try to publish before polls close?
Obviously, if we’d received this tip in January, there would have been no question about timing. We could have spent an extra two or three days on it, made some more phone calls to law enforcement and other sources, and still had it out long before early voting opened. But that’s not how it went down.
Instead, the timing was incredibly awkward. On the one hand, even if we’d published mere minutes after getting the tip (which would have been wildly irresponsible), it seems doubtful the story would have had a major impact on the voting totals, especially since it takes a few hours for a story to really get rolling online.
On the other hand, we didn’t want to be seen as ‘sitting’ on a political story like this. In the end, the story’s complexity short-circuited the debate – once we knew we couldn’t publish by 7:30 p.m., it made sense to take the evening and morning and get the best version out on a reasonable timeline.
After the interview with Southerland and especially Osborne, we had another debate: how much of their story should we include?
Keep in mind, this was kind of an unusual election story. Usually, we deal with allegations against a candidate themselves. They might refute them and press on, acknowledge them and step down, or offer some context and hope the voters are sympathetic — but in any case, the candidate has effectively consented to having their personal lives scrutinized by running for office (or reelection).
In this case, the allegation against Southerland was that he’d been dishonest — but explaining that meant putting Osborne, who is not what I’d consider a public figure, under a microscope. While we discussed it, we didn’t see a way to tell the story without naming Osborne and bringing up some disturbing information about his past.
Toward the end of our interview, Osborne told me he was bracing for the reaction to the story.
“It is fairly traumatic to have to then answer, you know, continuously take accountability of this thing that I had experienced, or that was placed upon me and shifted my life. So I'm kind of trying to prepare myself for what will come of that, because it's just going to be more victim blaming,” he said,
“I understand your point of view,” I responded, “And I say, with all due respect, that Mr. Southerland put you in this position by running for elected office.”
On the one hand, some of my colleagues felt like we were too sympathetic to Osborne and included too much of his account. On the other hand, we could reasonably expect that this reporting would have a substantial impact on Osborne’s life. This kind of article can cost people personally, financially, and psychologically – so it seemed fair to give Osborne his say. We did our best to scaffold what he told us with court documents and other context. At the end of the day, we felt readers could draw their own conclusions about Osborne’s account, whether they believed him, and how they felt about it. And, based on the comment sections, there were certainly a variety of responses.
The last decision, as is often the case for editors, was the headline. No matter what nuance and context you provide in the article itself, sometimes the entire report will be judged based on the headline — and sometimes, the headline is all people really read.
Ultimately, I went with, “New Hanover County Democratic Party calls on candidate to withdraw over relationship with sex offender.” I’ve heard some questions about whether that was sensationalist or overly blunt. Those are fair questions, but I think given the content of the reporting, it’s a fair middle ground, neither clickbait spin nor anodyne downplaying. The job of a headline is to tell you what the story is about, not to carry the entire meaning of the story into the world. With the invaluable help of my newsroom, I tried to provide the story in terms that were as fair, compassionate, and direct as possible – but that took over 2,000 words. So I take criticism of the 15 words in the headline to heart, but I take them with a grain of salt, as well.
Lessons learned and questions unanswered
As Hopman noted in her statement on Wednesday morning, the party learned some difficult lessons from this situation. They’re currently looking at ways to shore up their vetting process. All things considered, the party moved pretty quickly and didn’t mince words. Nonetheless, they’ll have to rebuild trust, an embarrassing process that will likely take some time.
It also seems, at least from the outside, like the parole system fell short here. While Osborne told me he had complied with all of the conditions of his release, I’ve heard a host of community concerns about his potential contact with minors, which is strictly regulated by his sentencing agreement. As Hopman noted in a chair report this week, throughout January and February, NHCDP hosted, promoted, and attended “dozens of events with candidates and electeds, political and non-profit organizations, community partners, and children, at numerous venues around the state including public schools and the Governor’s mansion; Rick Southerland brings a registered sex offender to many of them.” Perhaps all of this was cleared and above board, but every journalist I’ve talked to had questions about it.
There’s also the dance studio where Osborne and Southerland worked. They’ve since cut ties with both and scrubbed their bios and information from the website, but they never answered our question about whether Osborne had any interactions with minors on the job. Osborne told me he did not, but I’ve not been able to verify that.
And what about journalists? We missed this, too.
When candidates file, we put their names through various criminal and civil court databases, we look for name changes or unexplained gaps in their resumes, Google past news coverage, and even call around to other news outlets if the candidate is from out of town. What we find doesn’t always amount to a story, but we try pretty hard to do our due diligence.
However, candidates’ families and friends, while not ‘off limits,’ have not typically received the same scrutiny. For example, we have not historically pried into the lives of candidates’ significant others, unless it poses a clear and present conflict of interest or ethical issue. If a candidate’s spouse or partner got a DUI five years ago, that’s probably not a story. If the candidate is a prosecutor running for DA, and the spouse’s or partner’s DUI charge was mysteriously dropped – well, ok, that smells like a story. You get the idea.
Perhaps our approach should change, and we need to cast a wider net when we’re backgrounding candidates. And, perhaps we need to be more direct with those candidates. I think, going forward, I’d like to include in our candidate questionnaires something to the effect of, “Is there anything you’d like to come clean about right now, before it comes out in some messier, and likely far more damning way?”
Think of it as a journalist’s version of the cops when they’re about to search someone's car, and they say, “Are we about to find anything incriminating in there?”
So often it is the cover-up that’s worse than the crime. In many cases, people will forgive someone who is honest about their mistakes and flaws. People are far less forgiving about dissembling, omissions, and flat-out lies.
That’s next time, though. We’re still left with some unanswered questions about this time. More to the point, one particular question: how could nobody know?
I know I’m asking people to take my word for it that I didn’t know about Southerland and Osborne before the afternoon of primary Election Day – and that, when I called Jill Hopman and told her what I had just learned, she sounded like someone had punched her in the stomach. Maybe she’s a fantastic actor, but when she said she had no idea, I believed her.
But I will understand if some people remain skeptical. Hell, I can’t bring myself to believe that absolutely no one but Southerland and Osborne knew about this. It is, in my opinion, possible but not plausible.
“Three can keep a secret, if two are dead,” often ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, applies to any story like this, and doubly so in Wilmington, which is one of the most gossipy places I’ve ever lived.
I do believe that anyone who did know, made a conscious decision not to say anything, understanding, as Southerland and Osborne did, that it would be an issue if it came out. In other words, I don’t think anyone knew but also thought the general public would have no questions or concerns about it. Perhaps they thought they were doing the right thing, perhaps they felt the public would be unwilling to have a nuanced conversation about Osborne’s story, perhaps they were guilted or pressured, I don’t know – but I could understand any of those scenarios.
The fact is, no one went public until, confusingly, so late in the game as to be conspicuously immaterial to the vote count. Which brings me back to the question: cui bono?
Cui bono – “who benefits?’ – someone asked me, talking about the timing of the tip that launched this story. That’s a good question. Again, I’ve heard lots of theories. I certainly don’t think the Democratic Party benefited, given the reputational damage. And, while Republicans can certainly make hay of the Southerland scandal, I wonder how much they can really leverage the issue with middle-of-the-road voters, especially with the pall of President Donald Trump's alleged and adjudicated misconduct hanging over the party.
TL;DR: I honestly don’t think this was a political operative at work, although plenty of people will disagree with me. While it lacks the intrigue of a political hit, I think it’s both possible and plausible that the tip came from someone who simply found out and passed it along, thinking it was best for the public to know.
And that’s, I think, “who benefits.” The public. Transparency is almost always the best thing for the public. It’s the best disinfectant, as the saying implies, but it’s also the best policy, the best answer to hard questions, and the best opening line in a tough conversation.
Whatever you think about Southerland's choices or this week's reporting about him, I think he was right that there are important conversations to be had about criminal justice, the way sexual abuse and trafficking victims end up involved in the carceral system, and the lack of context and nuance when we talk about criminal records, sex offenders, and registries. And if he'd been transparent, his firsthand experience might have been a way into those really difficult discussions. But he poisoned the well with dishonesty, and it’s hard to see how he thought that wouldn’t be the case.
If, back in December, he’d started this conversation and his campaign on a different, more open footing, would it have been smooth sailing? Almost definitely not. But it absolutely would have been better than what happened this week, for everyone involved
