Mooch’s lawsuit an elephant that won’t fly
Sorry, Mooch.
You don’t have a chance at winning a defamation lawsuit against your alma mater, according to the libel experts I spoke with yesterday.
Embattled ex-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci is threatening to sue Tufts University’s student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, and Camilo Caballero, after the student penned op-eds criticizing the ousted Trump operative.
Caballero is being advised by the ACLU, which said in a statement last night the threat is “mean-spirited” and “completely consistent with President Trump’s ongoing attacks against the press.”
Scaramucci wasn’t backing down as he took to Twitter into the night to blast anyone criticizing his legal action threats.
Scaramucci is a member of the advisory board at Tufts’ Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy. A Fletcher student tweeted, “Oh wow. An advisor to our institution, Scaramucci is threatening to sue both my classmate and our student newspaper. Honestly, I came to the U.S. hoping that I would not deal with this kind of things, that are so common in Russia.”
Scaramucci fired back, writing, “This is a dishonest tweet. I asked for an apology. Plain and simple. In our country defamation comes with its consequences.”
He posted a long letter to Tufts students and faculty last night asking them to reconsider ousting him from the board, saying his involvement with Trump and the “infamous nature” of his firing aren’t reasons to remove him.
“I am a more complex and, candidly, better person than you give me credit for,” he wrote. “I hope we can use this controversy as an opportunity to begin, rather than end, a mutually beneficial conversation.”
Last week, a law firm retained by Scaramucci sent a letter to the paper threatening legal action if the paper didn’t apologize or retract parts of the op-eds, which called for Scaramucci’s removal from the board, touting a petition with 240 signatures. The letter said the op-eds disparaged Scaramucci’s character, actions and associations, and went beyond permissible opinion and falsely represented as fact.
Attorney Gregory V. Sullivan, who has been representing media companies for four decades and teaches First Amendment media law at Suffolk University Law School, said the op-eds fall under the “category of opinion, which of course is not actionable as defamation.”
“The Supreme Court once said there’s no such thing as a false opinion,” added Sullivan, whose firm, Malloy & Sullivan, has offices in Hingham and Manchester, N.H.
Public figures like Scaramucci have to prove the publisher knew the statements were false as opposed to a private plaintiff who only has to prove negligence, Sullivan said.
“But you don’t even get there unless you have false statements of alleged fact,” he said.
Tufts Daily Editor-in-Chief Gil Jacobson said he received a hard copy of Scaramucci’s letter via FedEx yesterday. Jacobson said there are no plans to pull the op-eds from its website.
“With anything that we put out as a publication,” he said, “we have to be prepared for a range of extremes to happen in response.”