Court Opinion

ID: 9547517
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:48:21.8924+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:17:49.773204
License: Public Domain

BRIGHTMIRE, Presiding Judge,
concurring in result.
I agree that plaintiff’s judgment on defendant’s counterclaim should be affirmed. I also agree the trial court erred in failing to submit the issue of punitive damages to the jury. And I agree that plaintiff was entitled to recover her attorney fees.
The main thing I want to stress is that I see no fact issue concerning whether the admitted conduct of defendant is extreme and outrageous. Following the language quoted from Munley in the principal opinion is this:
“The [trial] court, in the first instance, must determine whether the defendant’s conduct may reasonably be regarded so extreme and outrageous (emphasis in original) as to permit recovery, or whether it is necessarily so.” (Emphasis added.)
The court goes on to point out that it is only where the facts are such that reasonable persons could differ that a factual conflict is to be resolved by a jury.
Here I think when defendant admits he confronted plaintiff with some nude pictures he had of her and a tape recording he had secretly made during one of their passion-wrought lovemaking encounters and extorted the lien release from her through threats of publishing these private and personal secrets, he admits not only the commission of an extreme, outrageous and wrongful act, but indeed in my opinion of a felonious criminal act of extortion and blackmail under 21 O.S.1981 §§ 1481, 1482, 1485, and 1488.2
I would therefore vacate the judgment rendered on plaintiff’s petition and remand the case with instructions to submit to the jury the issues of how much compensatory and how much punitive damages plaintiff is entitled to on her second cause of action. When these issues have been resolved, the court should grant plaintiff a judgment for the $5,505 the jury has heretofore found she is entitled to on her first cause of action and for the amount it finds she is entitled to on her second cause plus a reasonable attorney fee, appropriate interest and her costs.

. Because the case must be partially reversed due to the error in striking plaintiffs request for punitive damages and because of our view of the facts, it is unnecessary to determine whether the supreme court's approval of OUJI-CIV No. 19.1 conflicts with or supersedes the earlier holding in Munley v. ISC Financial House, Inc., 584 P.2d 1336 (Okl.1978).