Getting the Truth on the Rios Trial

There has been much disinformation and attempts to injure Mr. Rios as a result of a recent jury verdict. Let me try and clarify the facts.

In 2019 a small group of disgruntled unit owners at the Belize Condominium complex spent $85,000 for attorneys and forced the Florida state attorneys to spend over $100,000 to try and prove that Mr. Rios had used “forgery” to impact and change the 2019 election of Board Directors which Mr. Rios had won. The first two counts against Mr. Rios alleged such “forgery.” 

The jury, however, found that Mr. Rios did not “forge” anything and, accordingly, he did nothing to alter the election results. Accordingly, Mr. Rios was found innocent of any of these more serious counts.

The only charge that Mr. Rios was found guilty of was the possible use of the personal information of three ballot envelopes of three unit owners. There was never any proof of what, if anything, Mr. Rios did with that information; namely, the unit owner name and unit number, information readily available from a number of other sources. That did not have any impact on the election results.

With the expectation of some future misleading and distorted versions of what happened in this case, I and several attorneys will be carefully watching to see if there are grounds to file defamation of character lawsuits against any person or organization that misleads and maliciously distorts the facts to hurt Mr. Rios.