Two New Rochelle public officials are accusing the publisher of online newsletters of defaming them as corrupt and unlawful.
Dawn Warren, the city’s corporate counsel, and Adam Salgado, the development commissioner, are seeking $250,000 each from Robert Cox, Talk of the Sound, and Words in Edgewise, in a complaint filed on Aug. 4 in U.S. District Court, White Plains.
They claim that Cox engaged in “an online smear campaign” because they refused to give him government documents that either do not exist or are exempt from public disclosure.
“As an Irish citizen residing in Ireland and publishing on an Irish website,” Cox stated in an email, he will not comment on any legal complaint that has not been served through Ireland’s courts, as required by an international treaty and a federal rule of civil procedure.
Cox launched Talk of the Sound in 2008 and Words in Edgewise in 2020. He describes himself online as an investigative reporter who has been a “thorn in the side of hidebound local officials accustomed to operating in the darker corners of City Hall.”
He describes Talk of the Sound as “the most widely read and influential independent news publication in the county.”
He moved to Dublin in 2023.
A previous city official, Kathleen Gill, who had served as corporate counsel and city manager, had given Cox direct access to city records, according to the lawsuit. When Warren replaced Gill as corporate counsel, “that privileged pipeline was shut off, prompting Cox’s retaliatory smear campaign rooted in frustration over losing the special treatment he had come to expect.”
Warren and Salgado say they advised Cox to seek a court order compelling disclosure of records, if he believed he was entitled to them. Instead, he used the newsletters to publish defamatory statements records.
From October 2024 though January 2025, according to the lawsuit, Cox published 28 installments under the rubric, The New Rochelle Thimblerig, a reference to an archaic term for a shell game or swindle.
The online reports stated, for example, that Warren and Salgado have been seen getting high together at City Hall; that they have a sordid past with drug issues; that Salgado kept a nude photo of a supervisor from a previous job and has a history of hiring sex workers. Warren was described as “Dum Dum” and incompetent and a disgrace to the legal profession. Salgado was described as “lover boy” and branded as a thief.
Warren and Delgado demanded that Cox retract the statements, this past December.
Instead, the lawsuit states, Cox posted the cease-and-desist letter on the websites and republished the false statements.
As recently as May 11, a posting stated that the district attorney is aware of a video on Salgado’s phone depicting Warren ingesting cocaine.
Cox stated in the email, replying to a request for comment on the lawsuit, that his reporting has triggered a 17-month, multi-agency criminal investigation led by the Westchester District Attorney’s office.
He also stated that on Dec. 10, 2024, the City of New Rochelle “took an extraordinary and unprecedented step – never before seen in the history of the American republic – to underwrite private investigations and litigation using taxpayer funds targeting a member of the press with the stated aim of suppressing reporting.”
Warren and Salgado claim that Cox’s online statements are false.
“These are not rhetorical flourishes or opinions,” the lawsuit states. “They are concrete, defamatory falsehoods, published with actual malice as part of a year-long vendetta.”
Warren and Salgado claim the campaign has cast public doubt on their fitness for office, harmed their reputations and produced emotional trauma.
Besides awards of $250,000 in compensatory damages, they are asking the court to stop Cox from publishing defamatory statements, make him remove the statements from the websites, and make him take steps to restore their reputations.
