In 1974, freshman U.S. Senator William Scott of Virginia was picked by investigative magazine New Times as the dumbest man in the U.S. Congress. (The article was written by then little-known Nina Totenberg, long before she had a national profile.) Asked why he did not sue the magazine for defamation, Scott actually made an astute observation: if he lost the lawsuit (which, as a public figure, he was likely to do), many people might have taken this as confirmation of the allegation.
Alas, not all public figures from the Old Dominion were quite as canny as "dumb" Sen. Scott -- as shown by the defamation lawsuit once filed against a newspaper called "The Richmond Voice" (or just "the Voice"). The Voice initially got into hot water over a 2009 article accusing a schoolteacher named Kim Taylor of physically, mentally, and verbally abusing special needs children at a middle school.
Taylor sued the newspaper and the reporter for defamation, and in March, 2010, the case went to trial. After a two-day trial presided over by Judge Melvin Hughes, the jury found in Taylor's favor against the newspaper and the reporter.
A few days later, a little deflated at losing the jury trial, the publisher of the Voice decided to exercise his constitutional right to grouse about the decision. The editorial stated that there was "a bevy of evidence proving that the information" in the 2009 article "was accurate," though conceding that "unfortunately, the judge and jury in the case did not feel the same way."
The editorial went on to say that "we never cover opinion as news, and we believe that such a clear separation is what has allowed us to become Virginia's largest Black-oriented newspaper." And then came this passage: "We were naïve in thinking that this fact alone would lead to a victory in a civil case we had deemed frivolous. We did not take into account the politics played in a courtroom -- between judges and counsel -- and the maneuverings of counsel who treat facts casually."
That last passage really irritated Judge Hughes. So much so, in fact, that a year to the day after it was published, he filed a lawsuit against the Richmond Voice in the Circuit Court of the Chesterfield County, near Richmond. (All of the counties in Virginia are named after cigarettes, of course. Or maybe it's the other way around. Just ask the folks who live in Lucky Strikes County, Virginia.
(Or maybe that's in Kentucky.)
Anyway, the lawsuit was only five pages long (not counting the copies of the two articles from the Voice that caused all the trouble -- the original 2009 article that led to the first defamation case, and the 2010 editorial that led to the second). It really doesn't start out that well for Hughes, though, as he refers to himself as "Melvin R. Hughes, Jr. (hereinafter 'Judge Hughes')."
Seems a bit high-falutin' to do that, even if you are a judge. If you were a truck driver named Bill Jones and sued over injuries you suffered in a traffic accident, would you call yourself "Truck Driver Jones" all the way through the lawsuit?
Considering that "Judge Hughes" was a public figure, it also seems a bit of a stretch for him to claim that he was defamed over something as mild as a statement about "politics played in a courtroom . . . between judges and counsel." If the judges on the U.S. Supreme Court sued over every newspaper accusing them of acting "politically," they wouldn't actually have time to be judges.
Hmmm . . . .
In fact, Judge Hughes may have uncontrollably lurched into something known as the "Streisand effect," a phenomenon covered in this space recently. It refers to a 2003 incident when singer Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for $50 million over the aerial photograph he took of her hilltop Malibu mansion. The photograph that so irked Ms. Streisand was only one of 12,000 part of something called the California Coastal Records Project. Once word of her lawsuit got out, though, nearly half a million people checked out the formerly sleepy photo website -- which only attained widespread notoriety thanks to her lawsuit.
Sadly, the records of what happened to Judge Hughes' lawsuit runs dry there. Judge Hughes, however, certainly got more bad publicity for filing the lawsuit than he undoubtedly had from the 2010 editorial itself. But it's likely that, like Ms. Streisand's, Judge Hughes's case was soon dismissed.
And perhaps he learned that while Senator Scott may have been labeled the dumbest man in Congress, he might not have been the dumbest public figure ever to come out of Virginia.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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