Victor Conte asks judge to toss “Sugar” Shane Mosley suit

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Attorneys for Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) founder Victor Conte on Tuesday asked a judge in New York State to toss out a civil lawsuit filed by ‘Sugar’ Shane Mosley.

The suit alleges that Conte slandered Mosley last spring by alleging that the boxer knowingly used EPO and an undetectable steroid in the run-up to his narrow 2003 victory over Oscar De La Hoya.

In the court papers, Conte’s attorneys maintains that Mosley had no legal grounds to file his libel lawsuit in New York. The papers also contend that the New York filing occurred only after Mosley’s legal team learned that their original libel lawsuit -- filed in a federal court in California and subsequently dismissed at Mosley’s request -- was likely to be dismissed under California’s 1992 ‘SLAPP’ statute, or ‘strategic lawsuit against public participation.’

Among other things, Conte’s court filing claims that Mosley filed the lawsuit in a bid to increase Conte’s legal bills to the point that he would be unable to pursue his defense.

The court papers also include a lengthy description from Conte about sessions during which he explained in detail to Mosley how EPO and the other steroid functioned. Conte said that he wrote up a ‘doping schedule’ for Mosley that outlined when the boxer was to inject himself with the two substances.

Here is an e-mail from Mosley’s attorney, Judd Berstein, who responded to The Times’ request for a comment on the filing:

‘The motion is just a recycling of the same tired arguments. There is an obvious reason why Victor Conte’s publisher has refused to cancel his book notwithstanding the protections of the First Amendment, it plainly knew that relying upon Conte would be reckless. Conte has not been able to tell a consistent story about Mosley. In contrast, Shane Mosley has been telling the truth about what took place all the way back to 2003, when he passed a lie detector test and testified in the Grand Jury.’

-- Greg Johnson