Opinion ID: 1217420
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Heading: invasion of privacy in oregon tort law

Text: Plaintiff asserts two grounds to hold the broadcasting company liable for causing him mental anguish. One is that the publicity defendant gave to plaintiff's injuries and pain concerned plaintiff's private life and would be offensive to a reasonable person. The other is that defendant appropriated plaintiff's recorded image without his consent to its own commercial purpose. The question whether truthfully publicizing a fact about a private individual that the individual reasonably prefers to keep private is, without more, a tort has not yet been squarely decided by this court. We recently had occasion, in Humphers v. First Interstate Bank, 298 Or. 706, 696 P.2d 527 (1985), to review Oregon cases on privacy since Hinish v. Meier & Frank Co., 166 Or. 482, 113 P.2d 438 (1941). In Hinish, plaintiff's name had been signed without his consent to a telegram urging the governor to veto a bill. In Humphers, 298 Or. at 715, 696 P.2d 527, we noted: An essential element in Hinish was the allegation that plaintiff's name was used without his consent and against his will, in other words, that using his name on the telegram was fraudulent. The case does not hold that it would be an actionable invasion of privacy to write the governor that `Mr. Hinish, too, opposes this bill,' if Hinish had made such a statement to the writer. The false appropriation, not the potential public exposure of Hinish's actual views, constituted the tort. There were three privacy cases in 1967. Hamilton v. Crown Life Ins., 246 Or. 1, 423 P.2d 771 (1967), denied liability when an insurance agent showed potential customers his company's check to a widow whose husband was known in the community to have committed suicide. Judge Goodwin's opinion for the court, after assuming but not deciding that First Amendment constraints allow a remnant of tort liability for invasions of privacy, noted that the complaint alleged no false attribution, no intrusion, and no appropriation of a commercially valuable testimonial or endorsement. 246 Or. at 4, 423 P.2d 771. The agent's disclosure of a private matter was offensive and boorish, but the court held that the injury is not one that would justify resort to the courts for damages. Id. at 5-6, 423 P.2d 771. In Tollefson v. Price, 247 Or. 398, 430 P.2d 990 (1967), defendant allegedly had included Mrs. Tollefson's name in advertising a list of delinquent debts for sale, wrongly stating that the debt was undisputed. We observed in Humphers that the Tollefsons' complaint alleged not only that the latter statement was factually false but also that it was made with the specific purpose to harass, vex and annoy the plaintiffs, and we noted that [d]eliberately harassing debt collection methods may be tortious without publicity or `invasion of privacy,' 298 Or. at 715, 696 P.2d 527, citing Turman v. Central Billing Bureau, Inc., 279 Or. 443, 568 P.2d 1382 (1977). The third case, French v. Safeway Stores, 247 Or. 554, 430 P.2d 1021 (1967), denied recovery when a store manager's note to store employees stated that plaintiff's relatives did not trust plaintiff to do his own shopping. In a later case, a claim that an insurance company invaded plaintiff's privacy by surreptitious surveillance and filming of evidence to defeat a compensation claim resulted in a nonsuit because the surveillance was not unreasonable, though the court affirmed nominal damages for the investigator's technical trespass on plaintiff's land. McLain v. Boise Cascade Corp., 271 Or. 549, 533 P.2d 343 (1975). This court also refused to hold police officers liable for revealing to a newspaper, and the newspaper for publishing, the name and address of a rape victim in a police report that was a public record. Ayers v. Lee Enterprises, Inc., 277 Or. 527, 561 P.2d 998 (1977). Finally, Humphers v. First Interstate Bank, supra , held that a physician was not liable on a theory of invasion of privacy for revealing information that disclosed the identity of a former patient to the daughter whom she had given up for adoption, although the mother could proceed on a theory of breach of confidence in a confidential relationship. Plaintiff's interest qualified as a privacy interest under Oregon statutes, but this alone did not suffice to claim damages from anyone who caused injury to that interest. Humphers, 298 Or. at 716-17, 696 P.2d 527. If the physician was liable, it must result from an obligation of confidentiality beyond any general duty of people at large not to invade one another's privacy. Id. at 717, 696 P.2d 527. The only decisions actually sustaining tort claims for invasion of privacy, therefore, have been Hinish and Tollefson. In each, the respective defendants' use of plaintiffs' name was false and fraudulent or made for an impermissible purpose. But the fact that the question of tort liability for truthful publication of private facts has not previously been decided does not in itself speak for one or the other answer. See Norwest v. Presbyterian Intercommunity Hosp., 293 Or. 543, 548, 652 P.2d 318 (1982); Hinish v. Meier & Frank Co., supra . We must place the claim in the larger legal context. Generally, Oregon decisions have not allowed recovery for injury to a stranger's feelings as such, unless the infliction of psychic distress was the object of defendant's conduct or the conduct violated some legal duty apart from causing the distress. See Norwest v. Presbyterian Intercommunity Hosp., supra, 293 Or. at 558-59, 652 P.2d 318, reviewing the cases. In the absence of some other duty or relationship of the defendant to plaintiff, it does not suffice for tort liability that defendant's offensive conduct is an intentional act. The conduct must be designed to cause severe mental or emotional distress, whether for its own sake or as a means to some other end, and it must qualify as extraordinary conduct that a reasonable jury could find to be beyond the farthest reach of socially tolerable behavior. Hall v. The May Dept. Stores, supra, 292 Or. at 137, 637 P.2d 126. Here the use of plaintiff's picture, of course, was intentional, but there is no claim or evidence that the broadcaster wished to distress plaintiff. Plaintiff does not charge defendant with the tortious intentional infliction of severe emotional distress. The duty defendant is said to have violated is a duty not to invade plaintiff's privacy in the two ways stated above, by appropriating and by publicizing his picture.