Court Opinion

ID: 9935133
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-09 18:55:23.194522+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:06.793655
License: Public Domain

Originally, I believed that this Court's holding was contrary to the holding in K-Mart Corp. v. Pendergrass, 494 So.2d 600
(Ala. 1986). However, upon further examination, I have concluded that this case is factually distinguishable from K-Mart. InK-Mart, the McDaniel/Burney test was used to determine if there had been a publication of the defamatory matter. 494 So.2d at 603. In that case, unlike this case, the communication concerned corporate business and was only between managerial employees; specifically, it concerned a pending lawsuit against the corporation. In this case, the plaintiff's district manager told the plaintiff's coworker, who had no managerial or secretarial role, that the plaintiff had been terminated for misappropriating funds. This does not fall within any of the no-publication exceptions. Therefore, I concur.