LaSalle J. McCoy Jr. said he never took a dime from the Chesterfield County Branch NAACP during the 10 years he served as president, and a county General District Court judge has agreed with him.

Judge Matthew D. Nelson found that the branch’s treasurer, Nicole S. Thompson-Martin, besmirched Mr. McCoy’s reputation by accusing him of theft of branch funds and has ordered her to pay $10,000 to Mr. McCoy, plus $62 in court costs.

“It feels really good,” Mr. McCoy said after being vindicated at the Feb. 9 hearing.

He said before he filed suit, he sought an apology from Ms. Thompson-Martin, but she refused.

Ms. Thompson-Martin did not respond to a request for comment. However, she has filed a notice that she plans to appeal the case to the Chesterfield Circuit Court.

Mr. McCoy sued for $25,000. However, Judge Nelson awarded him only $10,000 in compensatory damages. The judge rejected Mr. McCoy’s request through his attorney, Mark S. Paullin, for $15,000 in punitive damages, Mr. McCoy said.

The case began in March 2019 when Ms. Thompson-Martin, who was elected the previous November in 2018 as treasurer, obtained a criminal warrant against Mr. McCoy charging him with a misdemeanor of embezzling $200 or less from the branch’s bank account.

Mr. McCoy said she also spread news of the charge by email and social media, claiming information from the bank indicated the total Mr. McCoy had improperly spent on meals and other items amounted to more than $200.

A special prosecutor called in to handle the case declined to prosecute after reviewing the evidence, ending the criminal case in June 2019.

However, as a result of the charge, Mr. McCoy refused to allow Ms. Thompson-Martin’s name as treasurer to be put on the branch’s bank account as required by the NAACP bylaws. The national NAACP in the fall of 2019 removed him as president of the branch and as secretary of the state NAACP for failing to comply.

Mr. Paullin filed suit on Mr. McCoy’s behalf against Ms. Thompson-Martin in January 2020. The hearing was postponed several times due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The suit stated that Ms. Thompson-Martin “knew or should have known that her statements alleging Mr. McCoy stole branch funds that she made under oath in seeking a warrant for his arrest were false (and) were made with reckless disregard for the truth ... and that (Ms. Thompson-Martin) made the statements with malice.”

Such statements “constitute libel per se in that they accuse (Mr.) McCoy of committing crimes of moral turpitude, to wit, larceny and fraudulent embezzlement,” the suit stated.

Mr. McCoy said Monday that the money Ms. Thompson-Martin claimed he stole from the branch was spent for NAACP purposes and came from a separate account that supports youth members’participation in the national civil rights group’s ACT-SO educational program and competition.

“This all could have been avoided if (Ms. Thompson-Martin) had simply talked to me,” Mr. McCoy said after winning his case.