AP Photo/Susan Walsh

On the heels of yet another, albeit much smaller round of layoffs coming out of DCPS, Courthouse News Service reports that Ronnie Jones, one of the teachers who was ousted in the last D.C. Schools RIF, has filed a lawsuit against Chancellor Michelle Rhee. But if you guessed wrongful termination suit, you’d be wrong. Instead, Jones is seeking “$20 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages” for “defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress.”

Jones’s complaints all stem from Rhee’s now infamous statements to Fast Company magazine that she had “got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school,” and so on. The suit also names D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty as a co-defendant. Jones claims Fenty is also culpable because he “reiterated that [Rhee] was doing a great job and was in fact the premier superintendent in the country.”

Gregory Lattimer, the same D.C. attorney who successfully sued NBA star Allen Iverson after Iverson’s bodyguards beat up a couple of guys at Eyebar in 2007, is representing Jones. This case seems like it’s far from a slam dunk for Lattimer, though, given the difficulty he may have in proving that Rhee made intentionally false statements to the magazine in a malicious effort to discredit all 229 teachers that she had fired. Still, the existence of the suit illustrates just how badly Rhee appears to have flubbed her handling of the firings, which may be all the plaintiff really hopes to achieve anyway.