Court Opinion

ID: 9725146
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 11:32:26.209833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:11.188074
License: Public Domain

JEFFERSON (Bernard), J.
Although I agree with the majority opinion authored by Justice Kingsley, I am writing a separate concurring opinion in order to comment upon the dissenting opinion. The dissent erroneously describes the majority holding as creating a cause of action for libel out of a work of fiction that attacks the techniques of “nude encounter therapy.” Because of this misconception with respect to the majority’s *83holding, the dissent reaches the conclusion that the majority’s view “poses a grave threat to any future work of fiction which explores the effect of techniques claimed to have curative value.”
Had the defendant author of the work of fiction limited her novel to a truthful or fictional description of the techniques employed in nude encounter therapy, I would agree with the dissent that plaintiff had no cause of action for defamation. But here we have a description of a therapist as using insulting and vulgar language of the rankest sort in addressing his patients. Apparently the dissent does not consider that such language is capable of being considered defamatory of plaintiff in his professional role of a therapist practicing nude encounter therapy. The vulgarity purportedly used by the therapist in the novel would necessarily be considered by numerous persons as completely unprofessional and defamatory if used by a professional therapist such as the plaintiff. I fail to see how any jury or any court could consider such crude vulgarity as not defaming a professional therapist to whom such vulgarity was attributed in the practice of his profession. I need not repeat this language here as it is set forth in the majority opinion.
“ ‘The code definition of libel is very broad and has been held to include almost any language which, upon its face, has a natural tendency to injure a person’s reputation, either generally, or with respect to his occupation.’ ” (MacLeod v. Tribune Publishing Co. (1959) 52 Cal.2d 536, 546 [343 P.2d 36].) (Italics added.)
The dissent concludes that the “average reader” would not have considered plaintiff defamed as a professional therapist who used the crude and vulgar language. But the dissent does not tell us what constitutes an “average reader.” I assume that novels are read by the learned, the not so learned, and persons in all walks of life. It is my view that any reader of the novel, whether familiar with a professional therapist’s practices or not, might well conclude that a therapist described in the novel was a lewd and dissolute character in the practice of his profession. As indicated in MacLeod, a “publication is to be measured not so much by its effect when subjected to the critical analysis of a mind trained in the law, but by the natural and probable effect upon the mind of the average reader.” (MacLeod, supra, 52 Cal.2d 536, 547.)
The case at bench is not like that of Greenbelt Pub. Assn. v. Bresler (1970) 398 U.S. 6, 14 [26 L.Ed.2d 6, 15, 90 S.Ct. 1537], in which the court emphasized that “[n]o reader” could have thought that a newspaper *84which reported words of speakers were charging a developer with the commission of a crime in using the phrase “blackmail,” and that, on the contrary, “even the most careless reader must have perceived that the word was no more than rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet . . . (Id. at p. 14 [26 L.Ed.2d at p. 15].) (Italics added.) The Greenbelt court seems to place all readers—careful and careless alike—as average readers.
The dissent finds error in the instruction given the jury on the issue of identification. The use of the word “reasonably” in the instruction dissipates the dissent’s view that only one person was required to understand the defamatory meaning. If one person “reasonably” understood the defamatory character of the language used, it describes what readers generally would “reasonably” understand. I see no basis for the dissent’s view that the instruction had the result of mulcting defendants for the exercise of their first amendment right to comment on the nude marathon. The first amendment right to comment does not include the right to commit libel.
The dissent sees in the majority opinion a branding of a novel as libelous because it is critical of an occupational practice. This is a distortion of the majority’s position. The position of the majority is simply to refuse to permit a writer and publisher to libel a person and hide under the banner of having written only fictional material. “Of course the fictional setting does not insure immunity when a reasonable man would understand that the fictional character was a portrayal of the plaintiff. ‘Reputations may not be traduced with impunity, whether under the literary forms of a work of fiction or in jest.’ ” (Middlebrooks v. Curtis Publishing Company (4th Cir. 1969) 413 F.2d 141, 143.)