Wednesday's Weird But True Legal Cases - Vol VI

When is an April Fool's day prank obvious enough to avoid liability for defamation? This was the question examined by the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut, Hartford Division, in the matter of Victoria Square, LLC v. Glastonbury Citizen, 49 Conn.Supp. 452, 891 A.2d 142 (Super. Ct. 2006).

In this matter, the Glastonbury Citizen ran a article on April 1, 2004 under the headline "Sakon to Build Hooters, Wal-Mart.” The article stated that the plaintiffs planned to build a 250,000 square foot Wal-Mart store and the state's largest Hooters restaurant. The complex to be built would also, supposedly, include a helicopter launching pad.

The Plaintiffs were not amused by the article and demanded a retraction as they had no intention of building the complex set out in the Glastonbury Citizen piece. When no retraction was printed, the Plaintiffs filed a defamation suit against the paper.

In analyzing the matter, the court stated that although the lawsuit was grounded in defamation, the operative question was whether the article was recognized as parody. In so doing, the court cited to a California decision in Buttons v. National Broadcasting Co., Inc., 858 F.Supp. 1025, 1028 (C.D.Ca.1994) where it was noted that:

The butt of the parody is chosen for some recognizable characteristic or view-point which is then exaggerated. It is not for the court to evaluate the parody as to whether it went too far. As long as it is recognizable to the average reader as a joke, it must be protected or ... parody ... must cease to exist.

In applying this principle, the court concluded that the article was truly a parody and therefore not actionable under defamation law. In so doing, the court stated:

No such reasonable reader could construe the article in question as anything other than a parody. The defendants took considerable care to make it clear that the page where this article appeared did “NOT” contain genuine news stories. The article is surrounded by other mock articles which any reasonable reader would quickly determine to be both false and humorous. Finally, the article itself described development plans which were so extreme as to be obviously preposterous. The plaintiffs were, supposedly, planning to build a 250,000 square foot Wal-Mart store on the property; this would have been substantially larger than the building the plaintiffs wanted to construct. A helicopter launching pad in a shopping center in Glastonbury is equally ridiculous to contemplate. If none of this put the reader on notice that they were reading a parody, the statement that the Hooters logo would be positioned so as to face a local church and an elementary school would almost certainly get the point across.

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