We have just observed that some elected officials in Nevada may falsely malign some licensed professionals with impunity.
In 2008 a new city council was elected to a small Nevada city east of Reno. None had any government experience but they decided to terminate all supervisors, management and administrations. Four or five men and a woman were to be terminated.
The men were given notice and severance pay of one to six months.
Then they held a meeting and summarily fired the city finance director, a female CPA. In the meeting the CPA was accused of felonious crimes, misdemeanors and unethical behavior. No one knows why?
The CPA was denied employment elsewhere a couple of times because of the accusations. She got counsel and paid for forensic audits and was cleared of all accusations. Charges against city council were filed in Federal Court and it was ruled that local elected official in Nevada acting in their elected capacity could say anything about anybody. There are no protections, zero, none.
Speaking purely generically in absence of links or hard references:
A city council, as a local government body, probably is sheltered by a form of parliamentary immunity, by which statements made in debate or report may not be a cause for action against the individual members acting in their official legislative function. This is widely practiced across the USA and the world and yes, it means that a city council or a state legislature may put on the record false statements with impunity to excuse their actions, as long as it is part of the legislative proceedings and the rest of the legislative body does not call them on it by approving a motion to strike from the record.
The officials are still subject to slander and libel laws when acting in their personal character or outside the scope of their official function.
The way you describe the actions, absent a link, it seems like the council decided that in her case they’d proceed by a manner of impeaching her, rather than an at-will termination(*). Impeachment being a political act, it is covered by the legislative immunity and the rules of evidence and procedure are whatever the legislative body wants them to be.
(*Thus not having to compensate her for severance, without going through whatever is the administrative procedure – probably involving a hearing and a right to appeal in court – for a real “for cause” dismissal.)
The key would be if the law in Nevada, or the ordinances in that city, do provide for that manner of dismissal. If so she’s stuck. This still bites hard, since ideally even in an impeachment there should be observed a due process including the presentation of some actual evidence and the right of the person to put forth their side of the case, but we do not know if that happened.
If the individuals are protected while speaking in an official capacity, can you bring an action against the city itself? If everything is as the OP says, the CPA was harmed by the accusation, and it was shown to be false. It seems there ought to be some legal recourse.
Not really having thought about this before, it would seem to me to be a reasonable thing to allow a state legislature to be able to waive the legislative immunity statute in cases where there is a reasonable belief that the defamation is based on intent and malice.
However, based on my very quick reading of one report, it seems to be alleged that this CPA used a government credit card to pay for expenses that included her CPA licensing fees and a trip to some kind of CPA related conference in Utah. The Nevada Commission on Ethics concluded that those charges were questionable as to whether they could be billed to the government. I’m not sure if the statements by the council members themselves went further, but at first blush it would seem a stretch to say that misuse of a government credit card by this person was known to be an untrue and malicious statement at the time it was made.