More legal trouble has landed in the lap of Alan Mendelsohn, a Hollywood doctor and former big-time Republican fundraiser who pleaded not guilty in September to a 32-count public-corruption indictment and in June to five criminal tax charges.
Mendelsohn was recently added as a defendant to a Broward civil lawsuit filed by former state Rep. Tim Ryan in 2008 involving the state Senate race he lost to Eleanor Sobel.
Political consultant Richard Heffley was also added as a defendant.
Ryan’s suit accuses a secretive electioneering group, People for a Better Florida Fund, of distorting his record.
Mendelsohn, who raised money for the fund, “took the Fifth Amendment on every question practically,” said Ryan’s attorney Skip Campbell.
Mendelsohn’s attorney, Alvin Entin, called the lawsuit “a bad faith political move on Skip Campbell’s part.”
In the criminal case, Mendelsohn is accused of raising more than $2 million to influence legislators, paying $87,000 to an unidentified former public official, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on his children’s education and his former mistress.
