Jeff Greene’s libel lawsuit against The Miami Herald and The Tampa Bay Times was revived by a three judge panel in Miami. (Photo by SalFalko)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
A once-dismissed libel lawsuit filed by former U.S. Senate candidate and billionaire Jeff Greene against The Miami Herald and The Tampa Bay Times was revived this week.
According to the News Service of Florida:
A three-judge panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Miami reversed decisions in 2012 by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Valerie Manno Schurr dismissing the case. The appeals court found that Greene’s complaint “states a legally sufficient cause of action” against the Times Publishing Co., the Miami Herald Media Co. and three reporters.
“We express no opinion regarding the accuracy of Greene’s allegations and his ability to prove them,” wrote Judge Vance Salter, who was joined by Chief Judge Frank Shepherd and Judge Leslie Rothenberg. “We simply hold that, at the preliminary point of assessing the legal sufficiency of the complaint and attachments, Greene has adequately detailed a cause of action for libel as to each article and each defendant.”
Greene went after the newspapers in 2010 for articles that alleged suspect real-estate deals and parties on his yacht.
Greene, who ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate during 2010’s contentious race in Florida, claims the reports soured his reputation and lost him the bid for the seat.
It is unusual for a public figure to go after a newspaper for libel for many reasons. For one, they are expensive—and second, they are really hard to win. In order for Greene to have won that lawsuit, he would have had to prove that the paper wrote the articles with malice. For a private individual, one would just have to prove a paper was reckless to win a libel suit.
However, because Greene is a billionaire he was in a better position to jump into a costly legal battle than perhaps other politicians.
According to a 2010 New York Times article:
Dogged by rumors about wild parties aboard his 145-foot yacht and about fraudulent real estate deals, Mr. Greene will seek at least $500 million in damages in part, he said, to teach the news media a lesson. “I want to send a message to every newspaper in the country: Do your homework,” he said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “I deserve to have the record corrected, and they deserve to be punished.”
He has hired L. Lin Wood, a prominent libel lawyer who has won settlements for other public figures who claimed they were defamed by the news media, including Richard A. Jewell, the security guard cleared as a suspect in the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. Mr. Wood said he expected to file a formal complaint in state court in Miami-Dade County on Wednesday.
… In one article, The Times reported that Mr. Greene was party to a real estate deal that left 300 California families homeless and a partner of his in jail. The other left the impression that the boxer Mike Tyson, who was the best man at Mr. Greene’s wedding, used drugs while on Mr. Greene’s yacht. The paper later ran a front-page correction clarifying that Mr. Tyson said he had not used drugs on the yacht.
At issue are two news articles written by St. Petersburg Times reporters that were printed in both The Times and The Herald, and a Times editorial urging a federal investigation into Mr. Greene’s business activities.
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Valerie Manno-Schurr ruled last April that Greene was unable to prove the paper acted in malice, thus dismissing the case.
The Tampa Bay Times reported at the time that the judge ruled not only that Greene failed to “properly allege” that the Times was “reckless,” which would have been the lower hurdle, but also asked the “Court to engage in a post election analysis and to award damages against the defendants for a lost election.”
“The fact that the plaintiff may not like the way the article was written or how it was written does not automatically provide the basis for a libel suit,” the judge wrote.
The judge also declared that Greene’s 2010 campaign made him a public figure: “There is no doubt that Greene had injected himself, even if for a limited time, into the public arena as a candidate for public office (so) he is considered a public figure.”
Attorney George Rahdert spoke on behalf of the Times Publishing Co.
“It’s an appropriate dismissal of a lawsuit that should never have been filed,” he said. “In America, we have a lot of latitude to talk about important public matters like a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and the press should be able to write about political events without fear of being sued.”
According to this new court panel, however, Greene was indeed able to prove recklessness—even though the first judge was ultimately seeking proof of malice.
In its decision Wednesday, the Third District panel acknowledged that the libel complaints by public figures are subject “to a more rigorous set of tests than a contract claim between private parties” but said that Greene had provided enough information about the defendants’ alleged “reckless disregard” to pass the pleading stage.
The appeals court panel also said that the alleged falsehoods are not “protected as a matter of law by the ‘substantial truth’ doctrine,” under which a statement cannot be deemed libelous if it is true.
Greene has not sought political office since his failed U.S. Senate bid in 2010.