Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘libel slander and defamation’

“I Am Not A Jackass”

A.J. Jacobs considers–and rejects–the idea of suing Joe Queenan over a bad book review.

But then I remembered what I had learned in the encyclopedia: James McNeill Whistler tried this tactic, and it ended pretty badly. He filed a libel suit in 1878 after the critic John Ruskin called him a ”coxcomb” and denounced his painting ”Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.” Whistler won a token judgment of a farthing — but the cost of the case bankrupted him. So no lawsuits from me. And at least I wasn’t called a coxcomb.

(NY Times, Feb. 13) (via Radosh).

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Performance review can defame employee

Bad news for Illinois employers: “In a recent state appeals court ruling, a Chicago lawyer accused of allegedly cursing and displaying improper behavior during a performance review won a $300,000 defamation lawsuit against his employer, which fired him after the review. … The appeals court rejected CNA’s argument that what happened during a private corporate meeting — in this case the performance review — did not warrant a defamation claim because it was never printed.” (Tresa Baldas, “Lawyer Wins Defamation Suit Over Performance Review Claims”, National Law Journal, Feb. 10).

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Triple Play of Lawsuits

As I reported over on Sports Law (Feb. 1) and is also reported on Common Good (scroll down), disgruntled parents should beware the potential wrath of their children’s coaches. Parent Marc Martinez was not happy with his son’s baseball coach, John Emme, and filed a lawsuit against him “alleging that [coach Emme] hurt his son’s chances at a college baseball scholarship” by forcing him to throw too many pitches and by making “derogatory comments about [his] pitching ability to potential college coaches.” ( Martinez’s son had a 4-7 record that year.) The case received both local and national media attention and Martinez was not kind in his descriptions of Emme. So, Emme countersued for damage to his reputation. The jury favored Emme, dismissing Martinez’s claims against him and awarding the coach $700,000. Said one juror, “I think this should send a message to parents.” (Dave McKibben, “Corona del Mar High Coach Big Winner in Slander Suit,” L.A. Times, Jan. 28).

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Is $8M enough for being accused of sexual assault?

In December, Kevin Lindsey, a public school teacher and principal for thirty years, was arrested and “charged with two counts of child abuse, two counts of second-degree sex offense and one count of third-degree sex offense.” His name, and the allegations that he had abused two students in the late 1970s, made headlines in his community. Three weeks later, the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence about the girls’ “recovered memories” and everything went back to normal for Mr. Lindsey. Right?

Not quite. Though he has been reinstated as the principal of his school after briefly being reassigned to the district office, one can only imagine the long-term damage done to his reputation. Now he has filed suit against the women, asking for $8 million for “malicious prosecution, defamation and invasion of privacy.” (Sara Neufeld, “Principal files lawsuit against accusers,” Baltimore Sun, Feb. 2).

Read On…

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Watch what you say about lawyers, cont’d

Madison County: Gordon Maag, the trial-lawyer-backed candidate who last month was defeated in a race for the Illinois Supreme Court in what is said to have been the most expensive judicial race in American history, has filed a $100 million defamation suit against an arm of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce for saying bad things about him during the recent campaign. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Edwardsville Intelligencer/Southern Illinoisan/Illinois Leader). Jim Copland comments at Point Of Law. For two other widely noted efforts by Madison County lawyers to silence or intimidate their critics, see Nov. 4 and Nov. 30, 1999 and Feb. 29, 2000 (class action lawyers sue Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan for making fun of them) and Jun. 9, Jul. 12, Jul. 26, 2003 (dragging national tort reform groups to court). For efforts to suppress the airing of ads affecting the Maag-Karmeier race, see Oct. 27. For other watch-what-you-say-about-lawyers cases, see Mar. 16 and Nov. 15, 2004, Nov. 30, 2003, and earlier posts; and Point of Law, Oct. 25 and Dec. 22, 2004.

Read On…

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Defamation or reputation protection?

Winning a defamation case in the United States as a private person is thankfully and notably difficult. Winning a defamation case as a public person (someone well known in the relevant community or a public official) is extremely difficult unless there is an unmitigated lie, and nearly impossible if the case comes down to one person’s word against another’s.

Often defamation actions are covers — one person who may have done something wrong will protest his or her innocence, sue and accuser and use the pressure of a lawsuit to obtain a retraction of some sort. Those lawsuits are discouraged in California by the SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statute, which penalizes plaintiffs for using defamation actions as swords to prevent defendants from exercising First Amendment rights.

The Monk won’t hazard a guess here about the merits of this lawsuit that former US track superstar Marion Jones filed against Vincent Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. That company is better known as BALCO, [alleged] steroid supplier to the superstars. Conte stated in interviews and in ESPN The Magazine that he personally witnessed Marion Jones inject steroids into herself and that he cut ties to her because she kept losing steroid paraphenalia on the road.

Jones has passed a lie detector test and testified to her innocence under oath before various athletic committees and in affidavits. But her ex-husband was thrown out of the 2000 Olympics for steroid use and her boyfriend is reputedly similarly dirty. On the other hand, Conte has never subjected his statements to the penalty of perjury.

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MEMRI v. Juan Cole

It seems that getting involved in debates over Mideast politics counts as a high-risk activity, legally speaking. Aside from the defamation suits and threats of suits advanced by the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (see Sept. 17, Nov. 24), the pro-Israel Middle East Media Research Institute has now threatened legal action against one of its ideological opposite numbers, University of Michigan professor and blogger Juan Cole. (Reason “Hit and Run”, Nov. 24; Cole blog, Nov. 24; Crooked Timber, Nov. 24). And Cole himself, it develops, has been known to menace his critics with threats of legal action (Martin Kramer, Nov. 25; Reason “Hit and Run”, Nov. 26). For more, see Mickey Kaus, Nov. 25 (scroll), and David Frum, Nov. 27.

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CAIR using litigation to silence critics?

The Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (Sep. 17) has continued their campaign of suing or threatening to sue for libel in an effort to silence critics who have alleged it to be soft on terrorism because of what Senator Schumer calls the organization’s “intimate links to Hamas.” David Frum comments on the notice he received. (“The Question of CAIR”, National Post, Nov. 23).

California, believe it or not, is in the forefront of tort reform by permitting defendants to recover attorneys’ fees when defamation suits are intended to chill protected free speech. Another twenty-two states have adopted similar laws, with bills pending in eight legislatures. See The California Anti-SLAPP Project, Nov. 11, and Mar. 12.

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Update: Dow Jones settles online defamation suit

Dow Jones & Co. “has settled a defamation lawsuit launched against it by an Australian mining magnate”, agreeing to pay $137,500 plus $306,000 in legal fees to Joe Gutnick and issuing a statement in court that it never intended to suggest that he was a client of a Melbourne man jailed for financial misdeeds. The case drew wide attention (see Jan. 18-20, 2002) primarily because it occasioned a “landmark ruling in December 2002 [in which] the High Court of Australia unanimously ruled that the case could be heard in Gutnick’s home state of Victoria because people there could have read the article online. … The settlement is not likely to affect the precedent already set, said University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who noted courts in the United Kingdom and Canada have already cited the Australian decision in asserting jurisdiction over other Internet defamation cases.” (“Dow Jones Settles Precedent-Setting Internet Defamation Suit”, AP/Editor & Publisher, Nov. 16).

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“Lawyer sues ‘Law & Order’ over fictional attorney”

Well-known Brooklyn attorney Ravi Batra “sued the producers of the television show “Law & Order” for $15 million Friday, claiming they defamed him by portraying him as a crooked attorney in one “ripped from the headlines” episode.” (Samuel Maull, “Lawyer sues ‘Law & Order’ over fictional attorney”, AP/Houston Chronicle, Nov. 13). For some of the reasons why attorney Batra might be considered good copy, see “The judges’ friend and the $225,000 swivel chair”, Nov. 11, 2003. (& see Batra’s response: letter to the editor, Dec. 20, directing readers to this page (PDF)).

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