Prominent New jersey insurance, development and civic leader George Norcross III has filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit against the Philadelphia Inquirer and one of its editors for allegedly helping to orchestrate a bogus criminal case against him that was unanimously thrown out of court.
Norcross claims he spent nearly two years “under the cloud of a politically motivated investigation” undertaken by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin and facilitated by the Inquirer and its justice system editor Nancy Phillips. Norcross alleges that Phillips supplied law enforcement with false and fabricated notes from a 2019 interview with a Norcross associate and the Inquirer regularly published articles that portrayed him in a bad light as part of a conspiracy to “destroy his life, get him arrested and charged with serious crimes.”
Filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, the $100 million suit brings claims of defamation, false light, infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process, and conspiracy. The Inquirer and Phillips have not commented on the lawsuit. The Inquirer has a large circulation in New Jersey.
Norcross is a well-known business executive, philanthropist, Democratic political influencer in the state and an advocate for the revitalization of Camden and its waterfront. He was the executive chair of the insurance agency Conner Strong & Buckelew and chaired the board of trustees for Cooper University Health Care-MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper.
The lawsuit maintains that Phillips and the Inquirer facilitated the 2024 indictment by Platkin that accused Norcross and five others of running a criminal racketeering enterprise from 2012 to 2024. Platkin’s indictment alleged that Norcross Enterprises used coercion, extortion, and other criminal acts to tailor legislation to serve its interests, obtain property and property rights on the Camden waterfront, collect as much as $240 million in government-issued tax credits, and control and influence government officials including a former mayor of Camden.
Norcross pleaded not guilty and sought to have the charges dismissed. At the time, his lawyers characterized the indictment as a “crime thriller without a crime” as it sought to turn routine politics and everyday business negotiations undertaken to revitalize the Camden waterfront into crimes of extortion, racketeering, kickbacks and bribery.
“Although the indictment exceeds 100 pages and asserts over a dozen counts, it still fails to properly allege a single crime,” the defense asserted.
On February 26, 2025, the trial court threw out the indictment. The judge said that prosecutors had failed to show that Norcross’ actions were criminal or unlawful. Earlier this year, the Appellate Division unanimously affirmed the dismissal and the state declined to appeal, fully clearing Norcross of the charges.
Freed from the threat of prosecution, Norcross determined to uncover what he calls the “the corrupt mechanisms used to smear his name and threaten his freedom.”
According to the lawsuit, Platkin’s failed case relied on “knowingly false, fabricated information deliberately funneled to state prosecutors with the explicit intent to implicate him falsely in criminal conduct.”
The lawsuit accuses Phillips of operating behind the scenes to interview an individual closely aligned with Norcross in 2019, typing notes attributing false and misleading statements from the interview to the associate, injecting her own “unsubstantiated story ideas” into them and then arranging to share the allegedly doctored notes with the New Jersey attorney general whose indictment against him contained a number of the falsehoods.
According to Norcross, the 2019 notes described an “outsized role” for him in the property deal and painted him as insulting and threatening to others. They prove, the lawsuit contends, that Phillips acted as a “field general” of investigative operations into Norcross and Camden’s revitalization projects.
According to Norcross, Phillips “harbored a well-known and widely acknowledged deep-seated personal animosity” toward him, which he said was tied to a “bitter, public corporate battle with her late long-term romantic partner, Lewis Katz.”
The editor’s animus was “so extreme,” according to Norcross, that she previously fabricated claims implicating him in the deaths of her former partner and a separate former Norcross business associate.
Norcross maintains that the Inquirer assured him that Phillips was “entirely uninvolved in the newspaper’s steady barrage of hostile, anti-Norcross reporting” but that those assurances were false. “In reality, Phillips actively directed and participated in the newspaper’s obsessive negative coverage of Norcross,” the suit claims.
The 33-page lawsuit contains eight pages of links to dozens of Inquirer articles from the Inquirer’s coverage that Norcross argues assailed him and agitated for his criminal prosecution.
The transmission of the notes to law enforcement was a violation of both Pennsylvania and New Jersey reporter’s shield laws designed to prevent state collusion, the lawsuit alleges.
Prior to 2026, a protective order prohibited public disclosure of these notes, thereby preventing discovery into how the state obtained them. Norcross believes discovery will determine how prosecutors obtained the notes.
Topics Lawsuits New Jersey
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