Court Opinion

ID: 9627504
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:46:37.619972+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:33:33.440788
License: Public Domain

WOOD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Summary judgment is a procedure that requires strict mental discipline on the part of both trial and appellate judges. We are not supposed to evaluate the parties’ evidence to see whose is the more persuasive. Instead, we must ask only whether a hypothetical trier of fact — a jury, or a court in a bench trial — could find in favor of the non-moving party. This necessarily means that both trial judges and appellate judges must sometimes reject summary judgment in favor of a party who (they think) will probably win in the final analysis. The line between a case that ought to be thrown out on summary judgment because there are no disputed issues of material fact, and one in which material facts are disputed but that seems like a long shot, can be blurry.
Here, my colleagues have decided that plaintiff Carl Madison’s case falls on the former side of that line. See ante, at 657-59. With respect, I cannot agree with that assessment. For the reasons that I outline briefly here, I believe that Madison has introduced evidence of actual malice that, if believed by the trier of fact, would support a verdict in his favor. I would therefore reverse the summary judgment in favor of the defendants and remand the case for a trial on Madison’s defamation claim.
I focus on actual malice because I agree with much of the rest of the majority’s analysis. Most of the statements that Madison challenges in defendant Renatta Frazier’s book, The Enemy in Blue, could not support a recovery for him. As the majority explains, the “fantasy sequence” is just that — an account of an imaginary beating and its aftermath. No one is identified either by name or description, and thus it is saved by Illinois’s “innocent con*660struction” rule. Similarly, the statements in Chapter Eight of Frazier’s book wondering whose side Madison was really on, or whether he might run for public office, are merely statements of opinion. But, as the majority concedes, the statements accusing Madison of lying (and perhaps, I would add, even those that blast him for “selling out”) impugn his integrity, his character, and his fitness to serve as the head of the local NAACP. The majority “accept! s] the fact that Frazier referred to Madison as a liar,” and it accepts “that under this specific context, the statement was defamatory per se.” Ante, at 657. I, too, reach that point in the analysis. Where our paths diverge is on the final step that Madison must take: because he is a public figure, he must show that the defendants acted with actual malice. I believe that he can do so.
First, Madison points to the four-year gap between the events recounted in the book and the publication of the book. Frazier and Mitchell (her son and co-author) both stated in their depositions that they did no fact-checking when writing the book and used no outside source material. They relied only on Frazier’s memory and did nothing to ensure the accuracy of her recollections, nor did they follow up on her assumptions to find out if what she suspected had come to pass. Somewhat inconsistently, Frazier also stated that she made phone calls to certain people to verify certain pieces of information, but she admitted that she never did anything of the sort with respect to what she published about Madison. A jury could consider it reckless disregard of the truth to allow four years to elapse without ever checking to see whether this kind of inflammatory statement about another person is indeed true. See Catalano v. Pechous, 83 Ill.2d 146, 50 Ill.Dec. 242, 419 N.E.2d 350, 360-61 (1980) (finding liability where the defendant was himself “the original source of the defamatory statement” and where the defendant “made no inquiry to ascertain whether it was his inference rather than another which was the correct one to draw”). The fact that Frazier had the presence of mind to check facts relating to certain people, but not Madison, only increases the reasonableness of an inference that she recklessly disregarded the truth in what she wrote about Madison.
Second, Frazier stated in her deposition that she did not recall the details of her conversations with Madison (such as who said what or when), yet she said at other points in the deposition that she used direct quotes when recounting those conversations in the book and that her intent was to convey the conversations just as they had happened. In other words, her testimony was contradictory, both professing doubt about the accuracy and completeness of her memory and claiming that her memory was good enough to summon up direct quotes from her talks with Madison. The most frequent phrases that Frazier uttered during her deposition were that she “can’t remember” or “can’t recall” something. This is odd for a woman who claims to have written an entire book based solely on her recollection. Her inconsistency about what she remembered could lead a jury to infer that she was lying about her ability to remember the conversations completely and accurately, or that she recklessly disregarded whether her recollections were true.
Third, the book contains several inaccuracies. For example, Madison calls our attention to incorrect information in the book about a lawyer whom the NAACP hired to assist Frazier. More significantly, a book reviewer (who, as it happens, was treated favorably in Frazier’s book) pointed out in a published review a litany of misstatements in the book, which ranged from careless errors to vindictive *661mischaracterizations. The reviewer wrote, “I know for a fact that Frazier got some of her facts wrong — most by accident but a few because of her belief that she was the victim of a grand conspiracy.” She added that the book “could have benefited [sic— and irony noted] from a spell check, a grammar check, and, especially, a reality check. People she likes get special treatment (in her book, I’m young and skinny; in real life, I’m aged and gelatinous), and people she dislikes get body-slammed (Carl Madison left town just in time).” This, too, supports an inference that Frazier knew that she was distorting the truth in a way that was malicious toward her “enemies.”
Fourth, and as the majority points out, Frazier had a “very obvious dislike” for Madison, ante, at 658, and her personal animosity toward him is painfully apparent, both in the book and in the rest of the record. While not dispositive, the extent of Frazier’s negative feelings toward Madison buttresses the other available evidence and lends further support to an inference that Frazier recklessly disregarded the truth about him when writing her memoir.
When everything is taken together (as a trier of fact would be required to view it), Madison has produced enough evidence to support a reasonable inference that the defendants acted with actual malice when writing and publishing The Enemy in Blue. This is a classic jury issue, and the record before us contains sufficient evidence to allow a jury to decide it. I respectfully dissent from my colleagues’ decision to end Madison’s case at this juncture.