Notes From The Underground Railroad

Your conductor is Attorney Barbara A. Laners. Several of you have raised questions concerning last week’s column. That column spoke of a recent case of the Washington State Supreme Court on the issue of “defamation”. Readers indicated that there was a need to further explain what constitutes defamation. Thus this week’s column. It is well settled that courts including the United States Supreme Court have stated that defamation consists of the following: 1) Oral or written statements about another person; 2) that are false; 3) that are “published” (that is, communicated to other persons); 4) that injure the other person’s reputation. If the words are oral, the defamation is referred to in some instances as slander. Written words may be referred to as libel. However, the trend is to refer to both terms as defamation. The rule is that defamation involves injury to a person’s reputation rather than his or her feelings. The court has examined this issue on a number of occasions and reached various conclusions of particular interest here. Courts have ruled that statements are not defamatory which included articles published in a newspaper describing ex-members’ criticisms of a church and another such newspaper article which referred to a minister as the “former pastor of a church.” Courts also ruled that ministers can also be found to have committed defamation in certain utterances from the pulpit. In one such case, a minister publicly (a pulpit is public) stated that a member of his congregation had a “vile spirit and utter disrespect for leadership,” and also declared that another member had associated himself with a pastor who “under the role of minister of Jesus is one of Satan’s choicest tools”. The court found such statements to be defamatory. See Brewer v. Second Baptist Church, 197 P2d 713 (Cal. 1948). It is also noteworthy that a minister was found guilty of defaming a former member by publicly referring to him as a “lost sheep” who had attempted to put the minister “out of the church”. Servatius v. Pichel, 34 Wis. 292 (1876). Defamation is in fact a cause of action. It can be pursued in certain circumstances. Those circumstances have been set forth. Truth is an “absolute defense”. If a defamatory remark is true, it is simply not regarded as defamatory, by most courts, including the Washington court. This defense to defamation is based upon the principle that the dissemination of truth should not be restricted by the fear of defamation lawsuits. Therefore, one should not conclude that information published in this newspaper which is based on true verifiable facts, whether signed or unsigned by author(s) constitute defamation. Moreover, information published from the internet signed by author(s) do not constitute defamation. The author(s) by virtue of publishing such on the internet forecloses any claims incident thereto. Particularly if the communication is published as scriptured by said author. Defamation does not depend upon whose ox is being gored.