Court Opinion

ID: 9756426
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:28:18.380084+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:22.163954
License: Public Domain

Murphy, J.,
dissenting :
I readily agree with the majority that Judge Digges erred in concluding, as a matter of law, that Werber’s article libeled Klopfer. I disagree, however, most emphatically, with the majority’s labored holding that Werber’s article did not, as a matter of law, libel Klopfer. On the record in this case, I think the question whether Werber libeled Klopfer by calling him a sex deviate was clearly one of fact to be submitted to the jury with appropriate instructions.
Whether a person has been defamed by another must, of necessity, be determined by an objective (rather than subjective) test, viz., whether the natural and ordinary meaning and import of the words used convey to the average readership a defamatory meaning. Where words are reasonably susceptible of two meanings, one defamatory and the other not, it is for the jury, as a matter of fact, and not the court, as a matter of law, to determine which would be drawn by the reasonably prudent reader.
That there is, as the majority has found, one and only one reasonable construction of Werber’s words — -that they are not defamatory — is a notion plainly dispelled by the words themselves. This is what Werber wrote:
“Unfortunately, we have permitted to enter *504the University too large a number of students who are away out in left field and these dissidents are constantly a source of embarrassment to us with our alumni. They have had on campus to harangue the student body over the last several years a procession of sex deviates, communists, advocates of narcotics and militant blacks; Harriet Pimple, Klopfer, Aptheker, Timothy Leary, Ginsberg, Adam Clayton Powell, Stokely Carmichael, Howard Fuller, Martin Luther King, and you name it. They did have one dedicated American in to speak, General Lewis Hershey, but they ridiculed him roundly.”
Being unable to find that the average reader could not reasonably believe that Klopfer was being referred to as a sex deviate, I dissent from the Court’s holding, and in particular to its conclusion that: “it [is] impossible to believe that any of the readers of Werber’s lampoon would not have understood that the inclusion of Klopfer in the list of left wing individuals was merely to identify him as a fellow with leftist leanings.”
I would reverse the judgment and remand the case for a new trial.