Cordele Chairman fights back against lawsuit

Cordele's Josh Deriso is the defendant in a lawsuit he says his opponents don't have a leg to stand on

CORDELE, GA- Cordele Commission Chairman Josh Deriso is the defendant in a lawsuit he says his opponents don’t have a leg to stand on.

“Where are the facts? Where are the dates? I don’t see no facts” said Josh Deriso, Cordele City Chairman.

Thursday, the chairman even went after the plaintiff’s attorney.

“By the way, with Mr. Forehand being such esteemed as he is, right here on the first page, it should be plaintiff’s, because I count four, not plaintiff. And then the audacity, if you look at those plaintiffs, you got a problem with the first person listed there. You should have thought better than that,” said Deriso.

The plaintiff’s include former Cordele City Chairman John Wiggins, who lost his seat to Deriso back in November.,

Wiggins says Deriso has violated Georgia law and wants him gone.

The lawsuit points to instances like footage obtained by South Georgia Television News showing the chairman removing a pro  police thin blue line picture at the city’s police department, to a traffic stop before Deriso’s election, which during the stop the lawsuit alleges he threatened the officers by telling them that he would be their boss.

“They know they won’t have three commissioners to remove me from office. They are trying to use Superior Court because it’s slanted and bias against people that look like me. And if it gets to that point, the jury will mostly look like people who don’t look like me, and so what they want to do, is they want to erode an election that happened last year, but it will not work,” said Deriso.

Chairman Deriso says he will continue to fight these allegations.