Miami Herald by Howard Cohen
January 15, 2020
From defending First Amendment cases to representing activists against developers — even when the developer is a world-famous soccer player — Richard J. Ovelmen was passionate about the law.
For more than 40 years, Ovelmen practiced constitutional, land use, local government, media, class action and intellectual property law. First Amendment cases were his specialty.
Ovelmen was legal counsel for the Miami Herald when Jim McGee and Tom Fiedler, working with investigative editor James Savage, corroborated a tip that Gary Hart, the Colorado senator who was a Democratic front-runner in the 1988 race for the presidency against George H.W. Bush, was fooling around with a woman on a yacht called Monkey Business. The resultant series of stories led to Hart pulling out of the race.