Jesse Scheckner
Headlines were plentiful last year when a former adviser accused Parker Collier, the matriarch of an influential real estate family, of duping Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration into buying a toxic tract of conservation land for $30 million.
Sonja Eddings Brown, a public relations consultant who worked for Collier for years, claimed in a federal lawsuit last year that Collier engineered the sale of thousands of contaminated acres.
The case was dismissed in August under an offer of judgment, a formal settlement made by a defendant to a plaintiff.
Now Collier is taking Brown back to court in Utah, where Brown lives, seeking $75,000 in damages for defamation plus attorney fees. She wants a jury trial.
Court Watch first flagged the lawsuit Thursday, two days after Collier’s legal team filed it.
The new complaint accuses Brown of launching a calculated smear campaign to extort money from Collier and destroy her reputation using false and sensational claims. The principal claim: that Collier engineered the sale of creosote-contaminated land near Everglades City to the state of Florida, an accusation Collier’s lawyers say Brown published in a lawsuit and promoted to media outlets.
Creosote is a chemical compound historically used as a wood preservative that today is heavily restricted in many countries, including the United States, where it’s banned from residential use. Long-term exposure has been linked to liver and kidney damage, neurological maladies and many cancers in humans.
In 2023, Collier Enterprises sold more than 11,000 acres of land in Jerome, a rural area abutting the Everglades in Collier County — named for the Collier family — to the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) for conservation purposes.
The land buy was part of a state project called Green Heart of the Everglades and is located between the Big Cypress National Preserve in South Florida and Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park just west of Copeland.
A sizable portion of the land bought, some 8,000 acres, was used to house the C.J. Jones Lumber Co., a steam milling operation, which closed roughly seven decades ago. Florida ordered the Colliers to clean the land.
Brown’s lawsuit — which sought compensation for loss of income, business opportunity, emotional distress and reputational harm — claimed that didn’t happen and that Collier fired her after she began asking questions.
She said her own testing, reviewed by a physician named James Dahlgren who specializes in toxic chemical exposures, showed creosote’s chemical signature remained in the soil and water.
Collier said through a spokesperson last year that Brown’s claim was “completely baseless” and vowed to “vigorously defend” her and the family’s “position and reputation.” An SFWMD spokesperson told the Miami Herald the district had conducted a “comprehensive environmental assessment” of the land prior to buying it.
Ernie Cox, a lobbyist for the environmental nonprofit that arranged the purchase told the Naples Daily News that the land wasn’t contaminated, describing Brown’s story “just wrong.”
Collier, who maintains she was not involved in the sale, says Brown first filed redacted allegations hoping to pressure Collier — who “greatly values her privacy” — into a settlement to prevent public disclosure.
When that failed, the lawsuit alleges Brown collaborated with media consultants to leak the unredacted, amended complaint to major media outlets — including the Herald and Naples NPR affiliate WGCU, among others — resulting in widespread coverage of the accusation.
Florida Politics reached out to Brown and Collier’s four lawyers, Ryan Bell of Kunzler Bean & Adamson PC and Jenny Lee, Michael Nadel and Rachel Peltzer of McDermott Will & Emery LLP. None responded to requests for comment by press time.
