Kia Vaughn, the Rutgers basketball player who filed a defamation lawsuit against Don Imus over his “nappy headed hos” comment, has withdrawn her suit:
Vaughn’s attorney, Richard B. Ancowitz, said in a statement yesterday that the junior from the Bronx decided not to pursue the suit so she could focus on academics and training for the upcoming season. Rutgers, which made it to the NCAA championship game last season, is expected to be one of the top teams in the country.
“Her strong commitments to both (academics and basketball) have influenced her decision to withdraw the suit at this time,” Ancowitz said in the statement. “We feel that we have made a strong and important statement against such hateful speech with the filing of this lawsuit.”
Translation: “Whoops. This case might be a little harder to win than I thought.”
I think the Overlawyered discussion thread (Aug. 15) about the case lasted longer than the lawsuit.
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And by the way, weren’t those RUTGERS fans screaming obscenities at Navy?
http://blog.nj.com/njv_mark_diionno/2007/09/rutgers_part_two_no_excuses_fo.html
Who will make a strong statement about that hateful speech?
No, actually I think we’ve made a strong statement that Mr. Ancowicz is a lawyer who’ll file anything so as to get his face on camera.
So Imus (and CBS) dodged the bullet. And likely, they did it before the fees incurred from motion after motion. Lucky them.
That’s one possible, albeit speculative, translation.
Another one would be: Having realized that a defamation plaintiff opens his or her entire reputation and therefore entire personal history to probing, the plaintiff decided that the risks of embarrassment and harassment outweighed the likely gains from the litigation.