Court Opinion

ID: 9489672
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:21:15.852888+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:19.059717
License: Public Domain

TERENCE T. EVANS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Sports books are a dime for two dozen. Bookstores often have heaps of them, many *273on tables marked “Sale, 50 percent off.” “Armed and Dangerous,” the autobiography of Buffalo Bills’ quarterback Jim Kelly, is such a book. The record tells us that 41 copies of the book were sold to Wisconsin bookstores and 28,559 were sold to bookstores in other states, including 10,501 in New York, the state the Bills call home. Of the sales of “Armed and Dangerous,” a staggering 99.86 percent occurred outside Wisconsin.
A.J. Faigin, one of Kelly’s agents from 1983 to 1987, says in this suit that he was libeled on page 57 and pages 159-60 of “Armed and Dangerous.” Here, in its entirety, is the claimed libelous allegation uttered by Kelly:
I was in Akron, Ohio, where my agents at the time — Greg Lustig, AJ. Faigin and Weinberger — were based. (I wanted to use another word besides “agents” here, but that’s better left for the lawsuit that is currently pending in Texas. My mother always said if you don’t have anything good to say about somebody, don’t say anything at all.)
I learned my lesson the hard way about whom to trust and whom not to trust in business. I had had complete faith in my first agents, Greg Lustig and A.J. Faigin. Before signing with them out of college, I talked to a bunch of other players they represented and they all said Lustig and Faigin did a good job on their contracts. Even Jack Lambert, the former Steeler great, gave them a strong recommendation.
Then Danny and the Trevino brothers started taking a closer look at my business affairs. And the more they looked, the more they didn’t like what they found.
Finally, I saw the light. In 1988, I fired Lustig and Faigin and put my brother and the Trevinos in charge of all my business dealings. Then I filed a major lawsuit against my former agents as well as the former owners of the Gamblers for defaulting on the payment of my signing bonus. Fortunately, I was able to catch the problem before it was too late, which made me luckier than a lot of other pro athletes.
Personally, I doubt whether, in the brutal world of professional athletes and professional sports agents, the tepid passages about Faigin could be construed as defamatory. But we need not consider that question, for our task, as the majority correctly notes, is simply to predict whether a Wisconsin court would consider Faigin’s claim to be a “foreign cause of action” under § 893.07(1), Wis. Stat. We must make a prediction because Wisconsin law controls, and its courts have not spoken on the issue. So the majority reads the sibylline leaves and predicts Wisconsin would say no. But I think the crystal ball is cloudy; the answer should be yes.
Wisconsin has absolutely no interest in this suit. And the suit, which actually is the reincarnation of a time-barred suit originally filed in Illinois, arrived in Wisconsin in a naked attempt to take advantage of a quirk in libel law that seems to regard a plaintiff, as the majority notes, as “generally considered to be injured wherever the defamatory writing is published,” citing Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., 465 U.S. 770, 777, 104 S.Ct. 1473, 1479-80, 79 L.Ed.2d 790 (1984). But Keeton involved “Hustler” magazine, which sold more than 10,000 copies of its publication in New Hampshire every month. On these facts, the Court noted, “There is no unfairness in calling it to answer for the contents of that publication wherever a substantial number of copies are regularly sold and distributed.” Keeton, 465 U.S. at 781, 104 S.Ct. at 1482. Faigin’s case is different, and if the key word “generally” from Keeton (a person is “generally considered to be injured wherever the defamatory writing is published”) means anything, it must allow for exceptions. As we recently noted, “generally” does not mean “always.” Roldan v. United States, 96 F.3d 1013 (7th Cir.1996). This ease presents a situation where an exception would make sense.
So we get to a prediction. I think the better one for us to make in this ease is that Wisconsin would view Faigin’s obvious forum shopping with disfavor. I think Wisconsin would closely examine the facte of this so-*274called “multistate defamation lawsuit” to see if permitting it to go forward would frustrate the purpose of its borrowing statute, which is, of course, to discourage forum shopping. I think a Wisconsin court would be impressed by how different the facts here are from Keeton. I think a Wisconsin court would look to see if there was a reasonable chance that Faigin suffered a real, as opposed to merely a fictional “injury” in Wisconsin. While I surely can’t say precisely at which point Wisconsin would be satisfied that, in the big picture, a libel plaintiff sustained an injury-in-fact in Wisconsin, I don’t think that point would be reached after only 41 books were sold in the Badger state when 99.86 percent of the others were sold elsewhere. And this would be especially true in a case like this where Kelly and Carueci live in New York, Faigin resides in Marina Del Rey, California, Doubleday is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in New York, and the book was written, printed, published, and distributed from places outside Wisconsin. I would affirm the district court’s decision to dismiss this suit.