Opinion ID: 1190385
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading:  The broader social circumstances in which the statement was made.

Text: The importance of social context has been recognized by the United States Supreme Court. The Court has observed, concerning the nonactionable words scab and traitor as applied to an employee who crossed a picket line, that such exaggerated rhetoric was common place in labor disputes. Old Dominion, 418 U.S. at 286, 94 S.Ct. at 2782, 41 L.Ed.2d at 763. Just as labor's historical confrontation with management presents a widely recognized arena in which bruising and brawling, rough and tumble debate is the daily fare, so does the social, moral, and political clash between pornographers and antipornographers. Dworkin is an antipornography activist whose activities are in the form of public advocacy and direct political involvement. She participated in the drafting of the Indianapolis antipornography ordinance that was enacted and then held unconstitutional. See Am. Booksellers Ass'n, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir.1985). Hustler's Bits and Pieces article is an ad hominem attack against an advocate of a social, moral and political viewpoint contrary to Hustler's. The statements in question were uttered in the context of an ongoing debate in which Dworkin seeks to destroy the industry of which Hustler is a part. In response, Hustler seeks to destroy Dworkin's viewpoint by vilifying its advocate. In such a heated and spirited confrontation, of which the statements are a part, abusive epithets, exaggerated rhetoric and hysterical hyperbole are expected. The offending phrases in this article are, unfortunately, representative of the type of language generated in a dispute over such a subject. Ault v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., 860 F.2d 877, 881 (9th Cir.1988), cert. denied, 489 U.S. 1080, 109 S.Ct. 1532, 103 L.Ed.2d 837 (1989). We agree with that said by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: Ludicrous statements are much less insidious and debilitating than falsities that bear the ring of truth. We have little doubt that the outrageous and the outlandish will be recognized for what they are. Dworkin v. Hustler, 867 F.2d at 1194. Vulgar speech reflects more on the character of the user of such language than on the object of such language. Curtis Publishing Co. v. Birdsong, 360 F.2d 344, 348 (5th Cir.1966). Having applied the Milkovich analysis to most of the statements in the Hustler article, we must examine more closely those four statements which appear more likely to be objectively capable of proof or disproof. As we examine these four statements, we are mindful of the warning that we must not engage, without bearing clearly in mind the context before us, in a Talmudic parsing of a single sentence or two, as if we were occupied with a philosophic enterprise or linguistic analysis. Ollman, 750 F.2d at 991. The four statements are: Dworkin is a lesbian; when Indianapolis contemplated an antipornography ordinance co-authored by her, supporters asked her to stay away for fear her repulsive presence would kill it; Dworkin advocates bestiality, incest and sex with children; and Dworkin initiated a nuisance suit against Hustler. We consider these statements in the light of Dworkin's legal burden of having to prove with convincing clarity not only the falsity of the statements, but also that Hustler uttered them with knowledge of the falsity or in reckless disregard for the truth. As shall be seen, Dworkin has not satisfied her burden in this summary judgment setting. Hustler has provided Dworkin's own writing to support its statement that she is a lesbian. [14] Neither in her argument before the trial court nor in her argument before this court has Dworkin challenged this particular statement. Thus, she has failed to carry her burden of proof in this instance. To bolster the statement that supporters of the Indianapolis ordinance asked Dworkin to stay away for fear her repulsive presence would kill it, Hustler provided two pieces of evidence. The first was an article from the Village Voice entitled, Censorship in the Name of Feminism. This article describes the attempt to pass the antipornography ordinance. It reads: Indianapolis, though, is not Minneapolis. When Mayor Hudnut heard of the Dworkin/MacKinnon bill at a Republican conference, he didn't think of it as a measure to promote feminism, but a weapon in the war on smut. He recruited City-County Councilmember Beulah Coughenouran activist in the Stop ERA movement-to-introduce the law locally. Coughenor's first smart move was to hire MacKinnon but not Dworkin as a consultant to the city in developing the legislation.    MacKinnon is    respectable.    Of the law's coauthors, she was most likely to be accepted by Indianapolis's conservative city officials. Dworkin's style would not have gone over in Indianapolisthere are no crowds of anti-porn feminists to galvanize into action, while there are innumerable tight-laced conservatives to be alarmed by the feverish pitch of Dworkin's revival-style speeches, not to mention her overalls and unruly appearance. Hustler also provided a New York Times article about the Indianapolis ordinance entitled, A Feminist Offensive Against Exploitation. Included in the article was the following statement: In Indianapolis, where many of the ordinance's proponents deemed Miss Dworkin too radical for the conservative community, Professor MacKinnon was brought in as a consultant   . It is true that neither of these two articles on which Hustler relies directly states that supporters of the ordinance actually asked her to stay away. It is clear to us, however, that the gist, the sting, the hurt of the articles and Hustler's statement based on them was that she was not hired as a consultant because it was felt her style would alarm the conservative supporters of the ordinance. The statement was substantially true. As this court recognized in Tschirgi v. Lander Wyoming State Journal, 706 P.2d 1116, 1120-21 (Wyo.1985), it is sufficient to show that the imputation is substantially true. See also Smolla, supra, § 5.08-.11. It may also be said Hustler drew an inference from the article that Dworkin was asked to stay away. Assuming that the inference drawn is false, Dworkin still must establish that it was drawn with actual malice. Dworkin fails to point to evidence of malice other than her statement that malice may be inferred from the character and content of the publication alone. Particularly in a case such as this, where Hustler reached an inference or interpretation from reputable source material, a mere inference of malice is insufficient. Plaintiff must show that the interpretation made was reached maliciously. Malice must be proved, because punishment of error runs the risk of inducing a cautious and restrictive exercise of the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and press.    The First Amendment requires that we protect some falsehood in order to protect speech that matters. Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 340-41, 94 S.Ct. 2997, 3007, 41 L.Ed.2d 789, 805-06 (1974). We turn next to Hustler's accusation that Dworkin advocates bestiality, incest and sex with children. Here again, Hustler provided source material for its statement from Dworkin's own writings. Hustler provided the trial court with a chapter entitled, Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking and Community, from Dworkin's book, Woman Hating. In this chapter, Dworkin describes a model society in which redefine[d] human sexuality transforms human relationships and the institutions which seek to control that relationship. She states that in androgynous community, human and other-animal relationships would become more explicitly erotic. She advocates destruction of the incest taboo in order to develop cooperative human community based on the free-flow of natural androgynous eroticism. Finally, she states that children have every right to live out their own erotic impulses and that the distinctions between children and adults would disappear as androgynous community develops. Dworkin argues that her book merely discusses these practices rather than advocates them. This does not resolve the issue. Assuming that her claim is correct, since the book itself is not mentioned in the Hustler article, the question of fact to be resolved is not whether her book truly advocates these practices, but whether Hustler's interpretation of Dworkin's work as advocacy rather than description is false and was made with malice. Again, Dworkin has failed to show that the interpretation was reached maliciously. On the subject of a critic's interpretation of another's writings, it has been said: [C]ommentary on another's writing was considered a privileged occasion at common law and therefore received the benefit of the fair comment doctrine. When a critic is commenting about a book, the reader is on notice that the critic is engaging in interpretation, an inherently subjective enterprise, and therefore realizes that others, including the author, may utterly disagree with the critic's interpretation. The average reader further understands that because of limitations of space, not to mention those limitations imposed by the patience of the prospective audience, the critic as a practical matter will be able to support his opinion only by rather truncated quotations from the book or work under scrutiny. The reader is thus predisposed to view what the critic writes as opinion. In this context, courts have rightly been wary of finding statements to be defamatory, unless the statements misquote the author, put words into the author's mouth or otherwise clearly go beyond the realm of interpretation. Ollman, 750 F.2d at 988. See also, Smolla, supra, § 6.12[7]. We believe that when dealing with interpretation of a literary work, we must be especially careful to guard the critic's right to express his opinion about the meaning of the work. Any author who places a book in the marketplace of ideas makes his work subject to criticism. Dworkin's book itself reinterprets fairy tales from a feminist perspective. Who is to say which interpretation is true and which false? Furthermore, the United States Supreme Court has allowed latitude for the interpretation of ambiguous documents where a claim of libel is made. In Time, Inc. v. Pape, 401 U.S. 279, 91 S.Ct. 633, 28 L.Ed.2d 45 (1971), the Court rejected the concept that a faulty interpretation of an ambiguous document could give rise to a claim for libel. In Pape, Time Magazine had erroneously reported that the United States Commission on Civil Rights had accused the plaintiff, a public official, of police brutality. Time misinterpreted a Commission report to say that the Commission had made the accusation; in fact, the Commission was only reporting allegations made by others. The Supreme Court stated that Time's omission of the word alleged when describing the incident of police brutality amounted to the adoption of one of a number of possible rational interpretations of a document that bristled with ambiguities. The deliberate choice of such an interpretation, although arguably reflecting a misconception, was not enough to create a jury issue of `malice' under New York Times. Pape, 401 U.S. at 290, 91 S.Ct. at 639, 28 L.Ed.2d at 53. The United States Supreme Court recently stated concerning Pape that [a] fair reading of our opinion is that the defendant did not publish a falsification sufficient to sustain a finding of actual malice. Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, ___ U.S. ___, ___, 111 S.Ct. 2419, 2434, 115 L.Ed.2d 447, ___ (1991). The same is true in this case. Hustler's interpretation of Dworkin's work simply does not create an issue of malice for the jury. Finally, we arrive at a statement which is difficult to classify. It has elements of either fact or hyperbole, depending on how it was used. Hustler accused Dworkin of filing a nuisance suit against Hustler. We have not located any authoritative definition of a nuisance suit, but in the most narrow sense it appears to refer to a suit which the plaintiff knows is not well-founded in the law, but which is brought to browbeat the defendant into paying nominal damages rather than incurring legal fees and costs. A nuisance suit may also have a rhetorical meaning, however. In a rhetorical sense, a nuisance suit may be one which the defendant finds inconvenient or annoying to fight and which he feels confident the plaintiff will lose. When a litigant without legal training refers to a suit brought against him as a nuisance suit, it is difficult to know whether he means that the suit is a nuisance in the narrow, technical sense or in a broader, rhetorical sense. In the rhetorical sense, calling a suit a nuisance should be viewed as expressing an opinion which cannot be proved by objective means. Even if a court rules for the plaintiff, that may not change the defendant's opinion that the suit was frivolous. The First Amendment protects expression of this sort of opinion. Dworkin had the burden of establishing that nuisance suit was meant in the narrow, technical sense. She has pointed to nothing which could satisfy that requirement. See Camer v. Seattle Post Intelligencer, 45 Wash.App. 29, 723 P.2d 1195, 1200-02 (1986), cert. denied, 482 U.S. 916, 107 S.Ct. 3189, 96 L.Ed.2d 677 (court held that a media defendant's attributing nuisance suits to a plaintiff did not constitute actionable libel). See also Waldo v. Journal Co., 45 Wis.2d 203, 172 N.W.2d 680 (1969). There, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's dismissal of plaintiffs' libel complaint which alleged the defendant's use of the term nuisance suit to describe the plaintiffs' taxpayers' suit against the city was defamatory. Agreeing with the trial court that the term is an expression of opinion of the writer about the suit, namely, that he did not think it had great merit, the Supreme Court said, [t]o import any defamatory meaning to these words would result in a strained and unnatural construction and give effect to innuendoes that are neither apparent directly from the language nor arise by clear implication. Nothing in this language could reasonably be construed as harming the reputation of the plaintiffs, lowering them in the estimation of the community, or deterring third persons from associating or dealing with them. Waldo, 172 N.W.2d at 684. In the broader sense, there was some justification for Hustler to believe that it would prevail in Dworkin v. Hustler , and that the suit was a nuisance. The Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals said the following in its opinion: Attorneys [for Hustler] have requested double costs and attorneys' fees pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38 and 28 U.S.C. § 1912. We have discretion to award attorney's fees and costs as a sanction against a frivolous appeal. An appeal is frivolous if the result is obvious, or the arguments of error are wholly without merit. DeWitt v. Western Pac. R.R. Co., 719 F.2d 1448, 1451 (9th Cir.1983). We denied a similar request made by Hustler in Leidholdt v. L.F.P., Inc., 860 F.2d 890, 895-96. Consequently, sanctions would be inappropriate in this appeal, which was filed under circumstances substantially similar to those of Leidholdt. However, the arguments made in this case have now been rejected by this court in Leidholdt, Ault, and in this case. Should litigants raise similar contentions in subsequent cases, the courts hearing those cases may consider in the first instance whether sanctions are appropriate. Dworkin v. Hustler, 867 F.2d at 1200-01 (emphasis added). In summary, we have applied the appropriate Milkovich analysis to the statements of and pertaining to Dworkin. We hold that neither the statements considered individually nor the article considered as a whole constitute actionable defamation under controlling First Amendment law.