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Date: 01-05-2001
Case Style: Weyrich v. The New Republic
Case Number: 99-7221
Judge: Harry T. Edwards
Court: United States Court of Appeals for the district of Columbia
Plaintiff's Attorney: Larry Klayman
Defendant's Attorney: Andrew H. Marks, Clifton S. Elgarten and Stuart H. Newberger
Description: Appellant Paul Weyrich appeals from an order of the District Court dismissing his suit for defamation, false light invasion of privacy, and civil conspiracy to defame. Weyrich's complaint asserts that he was defamed by an article, "Robespierre of the Right--What I Ate at the Revolution," authored by David Grann and published by The New Republic on October 27, 1997. The article is flowered with anecdotes that reveal Weyrich to be both emotionally volatile and short-tempered, and it depicts him as both a zealoted political extremist and an easily-enraged tyrant of the first order.
Weyrich complains that the article oversteps the bounds of protected political commentary by attributing to him, as its central theme, the diagnosable mental condition of paranoia. He further contends that, in presenting its overall picture of mental instability, the piece relies on false and misleading anecdotes, as well as two defamatory caricatures. The Dis- trict Court disagreed and granted appellees' motion to dis- miss Weyrich's complaint in its entirety prior to discovery.
There are other segments of the article, however, that may extend beyond protected commentary. Accepting the facts as alleged in the complaint, as we must, it appears that some of the anecdotes reported in the article are reasonably capable of defamatory meaning and arguably place Weyrich in a false light that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. Thus, because we find that some of the article's contested statements are both verifiable and reasonably capable of defamatory meaning, at least a portion of the complaint is sufficient to survive a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.
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Outcome: We reject Weyrich's claim that the article attributes to him a diagnosable mental illness. "Paranoia" is used in the article as a popular, not clinical, term, to embellish the author's view of Weyrich's political zealotry and intemperate nature. The author's musings on these scores are protected political com- mentary, for, in context, it is clear that his comments are meant only to deride Weyrich's political foibles and, relatedly, to attack what the author sees as the inability of the conser- vative movement "to accept the compromising nature of pow- er." In short, these comments cannot reasonably be under- stood as verifiably false, and, therefore potentially actionable, assertions of mental derangement.Reversed and remanded.
Plaintiff's Experts: Unknown
Defendant's Experts: Unknown
Comments: None