Casey Anthony wins another legal battle against man who found her toddler daughter’s body
.JPG "Casey Anthony, shown in July 2011, won a defamation suit against her filed by Roy Kronk, the Orange County meter reader who led police to the body of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Marie.")
Casey Anthony won in the courtroom yet again last week as a federal appeals court ruled against the Orange County meter reader who led investigators to her daughter’s body.
Five months after Caylee Marie, Anthony’s 2-year-old daughter, was reported missing by her maternal grandmother in 2008, Roy Kronk led authorities to Caylee’s body in a wooded area not far from Anthony’s Orlando home. The child was missing for 31 days before the family reported her disappearance to police.
Kronk soon found himself embroiled in Anthony’s criminal trial when two of Anthony’s attorneys implicated Kronk in the crime. The attorneys then began a media blitz to shift the spotlight from Anthony to Kronk’s discovery of Caylee.
Anthony, 33, was acquitted of the capital murder charges in July 2011, but was convicted of giving false information to the police about the circumstances of Caylee’s disappearance. She was sentenced to four years in prison and $4,000 in fines. She was given credit for time served and released from jail.
A few months after Anthony’s trial ended, Kronk sued Anthony for defamation, saying she and her attorneys “published false and defamatory statements about him during the investigation into Caylee’s disappearance and Anthony’s subsequent criminal trial,” according to federal court documents.
Kronk’s suit listed seven instances where the attorneys allegedly defamed him.
In February 2019, a judge presiding over Anthony’s bankruptcy ruled that there was not enough evidence to prove that she willfully defamed Kronk.
Kronk appealed the bankruptcy court’s decision.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington of the Middle District of Florida sided with Anthony and upheld the bankruptcy court’s decision.
“In sum, there is no evidence in the record of Anthony affirmatively directing her attorneys to make statements to the media implicating Kronk in the crime, nor is there even any evidence that Anthony knew her attorneys were doing so, thought it was wrongful, but contemporaneously failed to act,” Covington said in court documents.
This story was originally published January 14, 2020 at 4:36 PM.
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