George Zimmerman appears not to be content with being on the criminal docket alone. He is now a civil litigant in a lawsuit filed against NBC Universal Media for an editing error that portrayed him as a racist in coverage of the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. The very first line of the complaint starts out with an accusation of unethical sensationalism” ““NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so to set about the myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain.”
In addition to NBC and NBC’s Ron Allen, the lawsuit names as defendants Lilia Rodriguez Luciano (who was later terminated due to her reporting of the case for NBC) and Jeffrey Burnside of Dade County, another journalist who was also fired by NBC.
The second line is no more favorable: ““Their goal was simple: keep their viewers alarmed, and thus always watching, by menacing them with reprehensible series of imaginary and exaggerated racist claims.”
I am not sure if such reports “menace” viewers but it was clearly wrong and clearly harmful to Zimmerman. The network committed a serious error in the
editing of the 911 audiotape. Here is the audiotape:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
The full tape went like this:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
Thus, Zimmerman was not the one who raised race and was specifically asked to give Martin’s race by the police. However, NBC spliced together parts of the recording and left the opposite impression — a very serious mistake and lead to added international condemnation. NBC edited the tape to show Zimmerman stating “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. He’s got his hand in his wraistband. And he’s a black male.” It is truly hard to see how a “mistake” like that could occur without malice, but at best it was gross negligence. It certainly, in my view, raises a legitimate defamation claim.
This is one of four such misrepresentations cited in the complaint which is linked below. This includes stating that Zimmerman said “f—ing coons” on the February 26 call when he said “f—ing punks.”
Count one is an omnibus defamation claim. Count two is an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim. He is seeking both joint and several liability as well as punitive damages.
Notably, in some jurisdictions, he could also bring a false light claim. However, the Florida Supreme Court rejected the false light claims, leaving defamation as the only option in such cases. The court found that concerns over false light were valid: “(1) it is largely duplicative of defamation, both in the conduct alleged and the interests protected, and creates the potential for confusion because many of its parameters, in contrast to defamation, have yet to be defined; and (2) without many of the First Amendment protections attendant to defamation, it has the potential to chill speech without any appreciable benefit to society.”
There remains the question of the status of George Zimmerman in any defamation action. A status as a public figure or limited public figure would subject him to the higher standard of “actual malice” and the need to show actual knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard of the truth under New York Times v. Sullivan.
The complaint does not concede that Zimmerman is a public figure but it notably accuses the defendant of either actual knowledge or reckless disregard. While higher, there is a plausible basis for such a claim in the case even as a public figure. If Zimmerman tries to sue as an average citizen, he could face the same problem of my former client, Eric Foretich, who was declared a limited public figure due to a brief comment to the media in Foretich v. ABC. Zimmerman’s family made early efforts to frame his image in the media. This is understandable but could be viewed as triggering the higher standard if done with his knowledge or consent. It seems likely that he will be declared either a public figure or limited public figure.
Then there is the novel question of whether Zimmerman falls into a narrow category of a “libel proof” defendant. The complaint states that “[d]ue to the defendants’ journalistic crimes, Zimmerman has been transformed into one of the most hated men in America.” Yet, NBC could argue that his actions and confirmed statements resulted in that status and that, furthermore, he is now so without a good reputation that he is effectively libel proof. If so the court would have to find that Zimmerman’s reputation was already so damaged that he cannot recover more than nominal damages for subsequent defamatory statements. Marcone v. Penthouse Int’l Magazine for Men, 754 F.2d 1072, 1079 (3rd Cir. 1985). This is a relatively rare basis for a dismissal and the plaintiff has to be akin to a Charles Manson.
Zimmerman has long denied the allegations and insisted that he was defending himself. Moreover, these incidents occurred early in the controversy. There is no question that the case quickly took on intense racial elements. I have written before that I believe that the case was over-charged and that the media was engaging in highly unprofessional commentary. I do not believe that the defendants could succeed in a libel-proof claims anymore than Zimmerman will be able to escape the status of a limited public figure.
I also believe that the lawsuit has merit, even with the apology of NBC. The story had already spread across the internet and global media. The apology could protect the company from punitive damages, however, depending on how the evidence unfolds. What do you think?
Here is the complaint.
Source: Washington Post
yea, well George called Trayvon “a punk” “up to no good” and then killed him.
George lived through his pathetic ordeal of being called a racist.
I just think he is a liar and a sociopath.
bettkath, I agree NBC should have been more careful in their editing. I edited videotape many times for court. I would NEVER edit out exculpatory evidence nor would I try to even subtlely make it better for my client. I would alway have the raw footage marked and presented as evidence. After many years, even the most skeptical plaintiff’s attorneys[opposing counsel] knew I was fair and honorable in editing. The question won’t be was NBC careful. That’s something I believe they will stipulate to. The question will be was NBC willfull in their editing in an attempt to gain ratings and profit. It will be tough to prove that, I believe. But, I defer to the practicing attorneys here on that.
If he’s convicted, I wonder if the state’s “Son of Sam” law will prevent or impair any recovery Zimmerman could make.
The defense has been working on the jury pool. They need only one person to believe that Zimmerman was justified in killing the [punk, coon, goon].
Actually it is about a man getting a fair trial and citizens being able to be free of receiving a possible lifetime of scorn on a national level for something that has not yet been proven via a conviction.
Making him out to be motivated by racist agenda can cause him difficulty in receiving an impartial jury.
Put your preconceptions aside and put yourselves into such a position. How do you think your reputation would survive if a news medium did the same misquotation and misrepresentation on something you reported to the police and consequently were labelled as having racist intentions?
Not an issue? Well let’s look at this conversely. Inflaming the public with something as charged as racism does manipulate juries and due process. Take a situation where a jury has a racist disposition in their minds when they try a defendant. It clouds their judgement of the facts at times. How many minorities have in the past have been unjustifiably convicted (for example a black man in the 1950’s accused of raping a girl and sent to a speedy death sentence because of hatred for his race by the locals) or alternatively a white man acquitted of a lynching of a black man because the good old boy white jury gladly nullified the case. Racism plays a dual role in these examples.
Sadly this has / does happen. Can you see why his or anyone’s defense team and hopefully the judge in the case does not want to see racism taint the proceedings?
Try calling someone a child molester, even if they are not, and see how long that person has to live with the suspicion carried by others. If our Professor or the others have defended those who many elements of society deems to be pariahs GOOD FOR THEM. Every person within the jurisdiction of the United States (and I would hope the rest of the world) deserves to have a capable and dedicated defense advocate. Because that Pariah just might happen one day to be YOU after someone or some flash social media mob paints a scarlet letter on your forehead and you are in the same boat. And if you wanted to save your own skin, your last line of defense is going to be that lawyer who is brave enough to defend you despite what others might say or even link them to being a evil doer because they had the audacity to stand up for you.
On a side note I know that there are a lot of stong feelings on what many regard as the shortcomings of the legal system or the stand your ground law that might be offered as a defense in the Zimmerman case, but Zimmerman is just one person who should not be burdened with being the scapegoat and focus for all of societies ill hatred for those types of law. He is just one person. His failings, whatever the trial might hold true, should be limited to his acts or omissions, he should not be held accountable for the actions of the Florida state legislature who crafted a law so many object to.
nick, My point is that NBC should have used more care in editing the tape but Zimmerman has benefited more than hurt by it.
The brouhaha was because the man who followed an unarmed youth that he then shot and killed was not charged with a crime. Trayvon WAS profiled and the fact that he was Black was an important part of the profile.
Zimmerman has been hurt more by his own accounts (there are several variation) and by those of his friends, as well as the forensics.
Think about how GZ would be regarded if NBC had stuck to the truth, the whole truth, not a word slanted about the whole truth, and nothing but the whole absolute and total truthiest truth in the world:
They would have printed the entire NEN.
WOW!
Also, think about how the public perception of GZ would have been different if NBC said: “Zimmerman called the NEN number and said, ‘he looks like he’s up to no good,’ not volunteering the race of the ‘real suspicious guy.’ Later, in the conversation, Zimmerman exclaimed, ‘F*cking punks!’ under his breath. It turned out later that Trayvon Martin was an African American. Zimmerman appeared to not be quite sure about that early in the conversation.”
Then, presumably, nobody in our great country would have hated Zimmerman OR presumed that he was racist. After all, he would have killed an innocent kid who, he thought, could have been white — for a minute or so before Zimmerman stepped out of his car to pursue the kid.
Yeah, that makes sense. Until he became SURE that Trayvon Martin was Black, he did not get out of the truck with his loaded gun, did he?
Burn the village to save the village? The village did not need to be either burned or saved. The information generated by the NBC broadcast was neither untrue nor damaging. If you call someone a “punk” and then kill them, it is not any better than if you call them a “coon” and then kill them. If you kill them and shouldn’t have, you’ve got a credibility problem when you scream about being talked about bad.
I find this situation ironically funny. Getting worked up about a news media that continually allows politicians to make outright lies and slanders others and poor, poor Georgie Zimmerman with nobody understanding the nobility of his killing.
Sometime the best defense is a good offense and this is what this lawsuit is all about.
Darren Smith 1, December 7, 2012 at 12:38 pm
… it was the media that exaggerated the racist aspect of it.
========================================
So, does that mean it was the racism allegation that caused him to be disliked, or was it the killing of the unarmed teen?
Will which is more of a factor have to be proven by the plaintiff?
The suit is not meritorious simply because a law professor who was on Zimmerman’s side from the beginning says so. I found it quite silly to think that the whole country would be inflamed into an outrage because Zimmerman was quoted as saying “he looks Black” when within minutes of that seemingly harmless comment (in answer to a question from the dispatcher) he killed the “punk.” The reason the country (except for Alan Dershowitz, Jonathan Turley, Jeralyn Merritt and a bunch of others, among whom a certain subset of flat out racists and overdefensive guntoters figure in) was up in arms about this was Zimmerman’s deeds, not his words.
Zimmerman’s deeds:
1. He reported a kid as “suspicious” and then when asked why the kid was “suspicious,” couldn’t come up with anything rational.
2. He commented, at the LEAST, “he looks like he’s up to no good,” and “he looks like he’s on drugs or something,” and “I don’t know what his thing is,” and “F*cking punks” and “Sh*t, he’s running,” and “these a55holes, they always get away.”
3. He got out of his car to chase the kid who, he announced, “ran.”
4. He rang off with the dispatcher while not agreeing to meet the police at any one particular spot; HE knew they were coming but he did not want to commit to where he would be found when they arrived.
AND last but not least,
5. He killed the kid with a hollow-point bullet to the heart. The kid was unarmed. The kid was not on drugs; he was not “up to no good”; he was not engaged in any criminal activity. Zimmerman killed him and then made up a story about having been violently — nay VICIOUSLY — assaulted and having been forced to shoot in self-defense.
So, no, it doesn’t look like NBC caused Zimmerman’s problems. It looks like Zimmerman caused Zimmerman’s problems.
And interestingly, Professor Turley devoted years to the effort to representing the interests of Eric Foretich, whose case is cited above. What was NOT printed in the press about Eric Foretich, but which was available (and the press protected Foretich from its becoming widely known) was the fact that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals of Virginia actually showed how much real evidence was hidden, disregarded, and just plain buried in the big struggle between the two little girls who to this day insist that he sexually molested them (his two daughters by different mothers who do not like each other and who had independent validation of their children’s injuries) and his passionate, devoted, tireless lawyers who fought every suggestion that perhaps he should NOT be allowed to continue having the little girls in his “care” and “control” any more. In fact his younger daughter, [changed name] Morgan Foretich, actually collected her half of the money Foretich won in the lawsuit he brought against ABC, but she said she did so NOT because they reported anything wrong, simply because SHE NEEDED THE MONEY FOR COLLEGE.
Get that. Instead of suing to rescind the settlement, the “co-plaintiff” let the thing stand because it was worth $250,000 to her. I have nothing to say about that; it’s not my business. But what does it say about the way our media are allowed to report realities to our citizenry?
Here’s a piece of information never reported to the people by the press in the Foretich case: Both of his daughters went to Mercy Hospital in Baltimore at separate times using different names and different LAST NAMES and brought by two different moms. Both had the same findings upon colposcopic exam of their genital injuries. This was never reported.
Foretich gave up his visitation with the older daughter voluntarily because he did not want the press to get wind of the insurmountable problem this data would present to his screams and cries of “UNFAIR!”
What did the press report to us about Zimmerman?
Did they present him wrong? Did they defame him? Did they make him out to be a racist when he was not? Whose word do we take for any of that? His brother? His “friend” Joe Oliver who won’t answer questions? His “friend” Frank Taaffe who says “He was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take any more”?
Let’s see what happens with NBC. I think Zimmerman’s lawyers just brought this up now so they could publicize the picture of his bloody nose. Professor put up a picture of Zimmerman’s bloody head, in April, saying it was proof of “serious injury” and could mean Zimmerman would “walk.” In fact, Detective Serino described it as “capillary type…lacerations not coincident with” a vicious beating. So I’m voting that NBC kicks butt and perhaps collects Rule 11 sanctions for this frivolous suit. ❗
bettykath, So they “burned the village to save the village.” Wow!!! You must be omnipotent
I think NBC’s splicing was inappropriate but in the process inadvertently showed the truth.
Zimmerman did falsely profile Trayvon as young Black intent on criminal activity. The true part: Trayvon was a young Black man. The false part: Trayvon was intent on criminal activity. Whether or not Zimmerman is racist, Trayvon being Black was a key part of the profile.
It’s true that Zimmerman’s profile was raised by the NBC report and he benefit by nearly a quarter million dollars. Would his profile have been raised to the same extent if the tape had not been edited?
“The most hated man in America” is a sobriquet that came out of the Zimmerman camp and is part of the title of the book written by his federal marshal friend.
The best one could say is that NBC were trimming seconds of the original recording in the cause of air-time. However, that particular editing really smells of mischief.
I can’t say IF or to what extent that editing caused Zimmerman to take the view that he had become “one of the most hated men in America”.
My own view from the very start of this is that he saw Martin primarily as one of the local punks who “always get away”. I never saw it as driven by race.
To me ears, he clearly says “f**king goons” – ‘Goons’ being apparently the label by which local gangs were known.
Whatever the actual merits of his case, I see it combined with the latest graphic of his nose as an orchestrated media campaign. It distracts from the core facts of the case and the huge inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s accounts.
And by the way…
“Their goal was simple: keep their viewers alarmed, and thus always watching, by menacing them with reprehensible series of imaginary and exaggerated …”
I understod that this the given MSM methodology on behalf of the Department of Fear. Fox excels at it. 🙂
Does the fact that Zimmerman was selling his autograph effect his celebrity status and invoke the higher standard for malice?
For the kind of money Zimmerman is getting in donations, all I can say is NBC do it to me! PLEASE!
In the same decision that eliminated the false light cause of action, the FL Supreme Court also recognized & reaffirmed a cause of action for defamation by implication. Specifically, “literally true statements can be defamatory where they create a false impression. If the defendant juxtaposes a series of facts so as to imply a defamatory connection between them, or creates a defamatory implication by omitting facts, he may be held responsible for the defamatory implication even though the particular facts are correct. Defamation by implication applies in circumstances where literally true statements are conveyed in such a way as to create a false impression.” Jews for Jesus, Inc. v. Rapp, 997 So. 2d 1098, 1106-08 (Fla. 2008).
So FL very much recognizes the right to recover for true statements that give a false impression.
And in Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, 501 U.S. 496 (1991), the U.S. Supreme Court said that when dealing with direct quotations (as opposed to paraphrasing or commentary about a statement), deliberate alterations that change the material meaning of the original words can be the basis for liability and also demonstrate a knowledge of falsity. Quoting someone out of context in a way that changes the meaning behind what was said is actionable as defamation. Because when quotations are used, loyalty to the speaker’s intended meaning is more important than a precise reproduction of the words spoken. An exact quotation out of context can distort meaning, although the speaker did use each reported word. Masson at 514-17.
ABC lost its bid to have a case dismissed on similar grounds when they broadcast a partial video clip of a televangelist that changed the viewer’s understanding of what he said. Price v. Stossel, 620 F.3d 992 (9th Cir. 2010) (when dealing with material that is portrayed as a quotation, we are to compare the quotation as published with the words the speaker actually said; where the published quotation contains a material alteration of the meaning conveyed by the speaker, the published quotation is false).
Zimmerman is indeed a limited public figure and will be required to meet the heightened burden of proof of actual malice (as opposed to mere negligence for private figures). Friedgood v. Peters Pub. Co., 521 So.2d 236 (Fla. 4th DCA 1988); Mile Marker, Inc., v. Petersen Publishing, 811 So.2d 842 (Fla. 2d DCA 2002). However, that shouldn’t be hard to do in this case. At the very least it will most certainly survive a motion to dismiss & will proceed on thru the discovery phase, if it’s not settled before then.
It’s similar to the incident involving Shirley Sherrod last year when journalist Andrew Breitbart made defamatory claims of racism against her by posting a deceptively edited online clip of a speech she gave. Like Zimmerman’s 911 call, the full recording shows how the out-of-context excerpt distorts the truth in a way that seriously hurts the individual’s reputation. That case is currently on appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by the defendants after the trial judge denied their motion to dismiss based on Anti-SLAPP law.
Zimmerman’s case is likely to get bogged down the same way in removal to federal court proceedings & then litigation of the Anti-SLAPP issues before the merits are ever addressed.
In my opinion the news agency is going to lose this action. In reading the complaint there were multiple times alleged where the defendant misleadingly edited the actual conversation between George Zimmerman and the dispatcher, each time in doing this it was the media that exaggerated the racist aspect of it. Once could be claimed to be an editing error but three times?
Moreover, according to the complaint it was not just a matter of splicing elements of his statements together misleadingly. One in my view could not have been a mistake, it to me seemed deliberate.
from the complaint
In particular, the defendants falsely claimed that Zimmerman said “F____ coons” during the February 26, 2012 call, knowing that claim would incite outrage throughout the Nation
The truth, as known to the defendants, was that Zimmerman said “f____ punks.”
How does the defendant expect to be believed that the word Coon could be mistaken for Punks? The mention of Zimmerman that Trayvon was black came only after the dispatcher, in an attempt to identify who the other party was, prompted Zimmerman to say “he looks black”
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he white, black, or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
I do not see how this could be construed as Zimmerman being a racist just because he answered a question and he answered it without saying Coon or other racial slur. But that was the implied basis in their reporting of the incident.
The media is going to have a hard time coming out of this unscathed.
Think of what you like as to his guilt or not, but there is no excuse for this type of yellow journalism.
The criminal trial will likely have an impact on this case.
Not guilty will help Zimmy, guilty will zap this case.
This is silly since Zimmerman’s rep is NOT damaged at all since he has gotten nearly a quarter million dollars in contributions. THAT is a major FACT he will have to explain to the court and jury.
Come on lucky 7……..
I think the hanging jury will be here any minute and absolve NBC. Vegas has it 2-5.