Defamation in the Area of Entertainment Law This

This paper will examine the development of the public figure doctrine in defamation cases and discuss the application of this doctrine to the area of entertainment law. The first part of the paper will focus upon the historical development of the public figure doctrine, looking at the evolution of the doctrine in the United States Supreme Court. The second part of the paper will examine how lower courts have handled the doctrine, particularly in light of the vagueness of the Supreme Court's guidelines. The paper will also discuss how the defamation and libel laws have been applied in cases involving celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Carol Burnett and Carroll O'Connor. This section will also specifically address the question of whether a plaintiff needs to prove actual malice to prevail in a defamation lawsuit and the importance of the neutral reporting privilege in some of the lower courts.

The Historical Development of the Public Figure Doctrine

The issue of whether a defendant is a public figure did not arise until the middle years of the 1960s. Until that time, plaintiffs only had to prove that false statements were published which subjected them to hatred, contempt, or ridicule. The Supreme Court changed this in 1964, when it handed down the New York Times v. Sullivan decision.

The now famous case of New York Times v. Sullivan involved a New York Times editorial advertisement accusing the Montgomery, Alabama,

. . .
. Sullivan, civil liability may not be imposed for defamation against any defendant without a clear showing of fault. Indeed, the decision in that case set the standard for public figures: they must prove actual malice if they wish to prevail. To recap, a publisher will only be declared at fault if either 1) they actually knew that the story they were going to print was untrue before they printed it, or 2) if they behaved in a way that is so disrespectful of everything which they knew to be true that a court could find they behaved wantonly and recklessly with respect to what they print. As Justice Brennan so aptly stated in his now infamous opinion, in this country, freedom of expression needed breathing room if it was to survive. As this paper previously mentioned, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard of actual malice was more fully defined by the later opinion in the case of Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. In that case, an attorney sued because the publisher of the America Opinion because it claimed, among other things, that he had a long police record and was a member of a Marxist organization. The jury first ruled that Mr. Gertz was not a public figure, and awarded him $50,000 in damages. On appeal, the court decided
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Supreme Court, Times Sullivan, York Neutral, National Enquirer, Courts Supreme, Nineteenth Century, Gertz Critics, Supreme Court's, Audubon Society, Elizabeth Taylor, public figure, actual malice, supreme court, court held, york times, public controversy, public figures, elizabeth taylor, neutral reporting, neutral reporting privilege, lower courts, plaintiff's role controversy, york times sullivan, united supreme court, times co sullivan,
Approximate Word count = 7096
Approximate Pages = 28 (250 words per page)

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