An award-winning Arizona newspaper publisher and his wife are locked in a bizarre divorce case that has morphed into something more: a journalism ethics saga. Joseph Soldwedel has accused wife Felice Soldwedel in a lawsuit of trying to kill him by poisoning him, and detailed the allegations in one of the small-town newspapers he owns, the 13,000-circulation Prescott Daily Courier. None of the three news stories in the paper named his wife. But the Courier ran an ad accusing her by name, with a photo of her, bordered with images of skulls and rats. The ad said she had an unnamed accomplice, and it offered a $10,000 reward for tips. Soldwedel’s wife of eight years calls the poisoning claims ludicrous and says he is retaliating against her for seeking a divorce. “I’ve had people call me, text me, ‘Felice, is that you in the paper? Oh my god,'” she told The Associated Press. “It almost makes you feel like you want to leave town. He made me look like this horrible person.” The lawsuit alleging poisoning seeks $18 million from Felice Soldwedel and was filed a week after a prosecutor said there was no evidence of a crime and declined to file charges. “It’s highly problematic for a publisher to be using the editorial resources of the paper to pursue a personal vendetta,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the graduate journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. Published in Daily Times, December 14th 2018.