Warwick Wants a Gag Order on Its Loudest Critic

On July 17, 2023, Robert Cote stood up during the public comment period at a Warwick City Council meeting, congratulated Councilwoman Donna Travis on "another front page of the Providence Journal," and got about two sentences out before a police officer walked him to the door. Three years and one criminal conviction later, the city is in federal court asking a judge to keep him from talking about the documents it handed over in the lawsuit he filed over that removal.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, which represents Cote, filed a memorandum in U.S. District Court on Wednesday opposing the city's motion for a protective order — a request that would bar Cote from "disclosing the contents of or reproducing" the city's discovery responses "on any social media platform or otherwise making such responses public in any way, including but not limited to" discussion at City Council meetings. Lawyers defending the city filed that motion on July 1.

"Citizens should be free to comment on their interactions with government, including what happens in a lawsuit," ACLU cooperating attorney Thomas W. Lyons said. "If not, the government can make the proceedings secret and protected from public scrutiny."

The ACLU's memo argues the order the city wants would drape every item produced in discovery in confidentiality without any individualized evaluation — regardless of the document's content, its source, or whether it already sits in the public domain — and it notes that many of the documents already turned over are public records. Then it gets to the heart of it: "Many of the arguments made by Defendants are not directed to disclosure of documents themselves, but rather to upset or embarrassment that Plaintiff continues to speak negatively about them."

To be fair to the city, its lawyers have made an argument about fairness in discovery rather than about Cote's opinions. In court papers first reported by The Boston Globe, defense attorneys Marc DeSisto and Sarah D. Boucher wrote that Cote had made "broad" requests for documents from the city and the nine City Council members named in the suit, that the defendants combed their personal communications and email accounts to produce thousands of pages, and that Cote turned over nothing, saying he deletes all his text messages and emails. Whether one-sided production justifies a one-sided gag is precisely the question in front of Judge Melissa R. DuBose, who set an August 14 deadline in the briefing on the motion.

Here is the part that makes the whole dish worth plating — because in Rhode Island the sauce always simmers longer than anyone expects. The subject Cote was ejected for raising was Travis's acquisition of a strip of Oakland Beach property next door to her home. On July 16, 2024, Travis pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false document connected to that acquisition and received a one-year suspended sentence and a year of probation. A prosecutor said the lot at 735 Oakland Beach Ave. had been donated to the Oakland Beach Real Estate Owners Association in 1937, and that in August 2021 paperwork was submitted to the city conveying it from the association to Travis and her husband for $0. As part of the agreement with prosecutors, the property goes back to the association.

The censorship itself was reversed quickly. In September 2023, then-Chief Judge William E. Smith entered a consent order under which the council agreed to let Cote speak for up to five minutes at its September 18 meeting on the topics he'd tried to raise, and at future meetings with a public comment period. The ACLU kept the case alive seeking permanent relief. In July 2025, Smith held that legislative immunity shielded the council members in their personal capacities, dismissing them individually while letting the case proceed against the city — and he was blunt about what immunity does and does not mean, writing that Travis's act "indeed may have violated Cote's constitutional rights, may have evinced poor judgment, and may even have been done in service of an inappropriate motive or intent."

None of this is confined to Warwick. The ACLU's March 2024 report on public comment policies at Rhode Island town councils and school committees catalogued bans on discussing personnel matters, prohibitions on "personal attacks," and requirements that speakers keep a "courteous" tone — vague standards that in practice fall hardest on people criticizing the officials in front of them.

ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown put the irony where it belongs. "The City has objected that Mr. Cote is using documents disclosed in discovery to 'promote his narrative about the instant case in the public arena,'" he said. "That is precisely what the First Amendment allows him to do."