Libel Lawsuit

A telecommunications industry lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, filed a lawsuit against The New York Times on Tuesday, Dec. 30, in the federal district court in Richmond, Virginia, in response to a story TNYT ran on February 21, concerning her relationship with then primary candidate (later of course Republican Party presidential nominee) John McCain.

I commented on that story when it first appeared. I didn't think much of it as campaign reporting, but I didn't comment at that time about the legal issue.

The second graf of that story is presumably what most inspired this lawsuit: "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

The story doesn't say, there or anywhere else, that the "relationship had become romantic." It says that some of his top advisers became convinced that it had, and took actions as a result.

The lawsuit raises some great law-school-exam type questions. First, is a telecommunications lobbyist, as such, a "public figure" in a sense that would make any libel suit very difficult to maintain?

Difficult, but not impossible. So however that definitional quandry is resolved, one has to move to the issue of whether there was a statement of fact that could be libellous.

A plaintiff is generally expected to contest something the defendant actually SAID, explicitly. Mere "suggestions" don't cut it.

In one well-known case, "60 Minutes" incurred the wrath of apple growers for a program about a widely-used apple crop pesticide, Alar, that was a suspected carcinogen. The apple-growing plaintiffs lost at the trial court level, and the appellate court upheld the summary judgment in CBS' favor. (How ya like THEM apples?)

The 9th Circuit said that the growers had demonstrated an "inability to prove that statements made during the broadcast were false." The growers argued "that summary judgment for CBS was improper because a jury could find that the broadcast contained a provably false message, viewing the broadcast segment in its entirety," in the court's words. But the appellate court would have none of this.

It ought to be fairly easy to establish that she was in fact "turning up at fund raisers," etc. Is she contending that she wasn't turning up at fund raisers? or denying that McCain advisers tried to block her access to McCain? Or (this could be the tricky part) contending that their REASON for trying to deny her access was something other than what the paper said it was?

Is she contending that the story somewhere says that the relationship DID IN FACT "become romantic"? Or that it implies that between the lines? What it says ON the lines is just that some of his top advisers became convinced that it had, and took actions as a result.