A vicious and defamatory newspaper crusade made up of fictions and falsehoods engineered to topple the mayor of Everett has ended in a $1.1 million payout and the shuttering of a more than 100-year-old newspaper.

The end of the ” terrible ordeal” comes as an enormous relief to Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria, who announced the settlement Monday. The details, beyond those broad terms, remain sealed.

According to DeMaria, who gave a statement at a press conference Monday but did not take questions, the cash settlement and agreement that the Everett Leader Herald will cease publication within seven days represents the end of his effort to sue the newspaper for “egregious” acts of defamation.

“I have agreed not to go forward with a trial of my case against them, which was scheduled to take place in public, in Middlesex Superior Court, starting on January 21st,” he said.

The Everett Leader Herald will close after Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria won a defamation case. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

DeMaria said that “in many respects” he would have preferred the case go to trial in order to make the Leader Herald’s owner and publisher — Matthew Philbin and Joshua Resnek — admit publicly that they had “embarked on a deliberate, purposeful, relentless campaign to publish accusations against me that they knew were false.”

According to the lawsuit, on nearly two dozen occasions, articles published by the Leader Herald between 2019 and 2022 falsely claimed — among other lies — that DeMaria solicited and accepted kickbacks, including cash, that he had committed “extortion,” that he had “stolen” money, and had “threatened” people if they did not pay him.

The Leader Herald was purchased by Philbin in 2017, DeMaria said, specifically in the hope that the paper’s fake coverage could “drive me out of office, or worse.”

“I’m unaware of any instance in which a media outlet was purchased for the purpose of destroying someone’s reputation, but that’s precisely what happened here,” he said.

Once challenged with the lawsuit, the defendants “admitted to fabricating false allegations.”  They admitted to the wholesale invention of quotes and to citing interviews that never occurred, DeMaria said.

The settlement, both the cash award and the agreement the paper will close its doors, the DeMaria said, “is a reflection of just how egregious their misconduct was, and of the volume of their admissions.”

The outrageous conduct, “gives journalism and journalists a bad name,” he said.

DeMaria was represented in the suit by Saul Ewing attorney Jeffrey Robbins (who is a columnist and legal counsel at the Boston Herald), along with Joe Lipchitz and Paige Schroeder. According to Robbins, the settlement “marks the end of a very unfortunate process.”

“One which should never have been necessary, and never would have been necessary but for the decision of the owner of the Everett Leader Herald and its publisher/editor to embark on what, the evidence on the public record showed, was a purposeful, deliberate, and egregiously dishonest campaign to use that paper and its storied heritage to ruin one person’s reputation,” Robbins said.

Robbins said both parties agreed to keep the “actual settlement agreement” confidential, but to publicly release the terms of the settlement.

Through the course of the suit, first brought in 2021, Resnek admitted in a sworn deposition that the defamatory articles and their accusations were effectively works of fiction, the quotes used about the mayor and by the mayor made up, and that the “notes” he presented when ordered were written after the fact. In that same September deposition, Resnek apologized and said he regrets his dishonest behavior.

“The factual allegations you’ve just leveled at me, okay, for printing or making statements about the Mayor, I regret. I regret, I’m embarrassed by some of it, and I apologize to the mayor for it,” he said in September.

Emails and text messages revealed through discovery showed the paper’s owner embarked on a personal “Holocaust” against the DeMaria over concerns for his own Everett based businesses, including the soon-to-be shuttered Leader Herald.

DeMaria, joined Monday by his wife Stacey, thanked his family for sticking with him through “this terrible ordeal,” and thanked his constituents, “who themselves have suffered from the unscrupulous behavior of these defendants, who who have trusted me.”

Resnek declined to respond when reached for comment on Sunday. Philbin could not be reached for comment.