By Elizabeth Bulat
The Minnesota Twins, a Major League Baseball (MLB) team, issued a trespassing notice to a fan, Jason Gabbert (appellant), who, according to the Star Tribune (respondent), violated the Twins’ code of conduct by his “overly aggressive behavior in chasing down the balls” during the game.
Officials for the Twins called issuing the notice “a drastic measure taken when a fan acts ‘in an extraordinarily unfavorable way.’”
Initially, the appellant brought suit against the Twins to have the notice lifted, but the case was dismissed. The district court granted the Twins’ motion for summary judgment on the ground that “the Twins were a private entity leasing Target Field and could issue trespass notices as they wished.”
The respondent had covered this initial matter in an article with its publication. The appellant challenged the legality of these actions by bringing two additional actions — negligence against the Twins and defamation against the respondent. Both of these claims were dismissed by the Hennepin County District Court. The appellant further challenged the latter decision by the lower court, which was ultimately affirmed by the Court of Appeals of Minnesota.
The respondent covered the first Gabbert v. Minnesota Twins case in a manner that the appellant alleged violated the “fair and accurate reporting privilege.” The rule, established by Larson v. Gannett, of the fair and accurate reporting privilege provides that, “a speaker may be liable for repeating the defamatory statements of another.” At issue in the second dispute, Gabbert v. Star Tribune Media Co., were a series of newspaper articles written and published by the respondent. The newspaper articles covered the trials in Gabbert v. Minnesota Twins first with an article by Randy Furst (the Furst report), then another by Jeremy Olson (the Olson report), followed by a column by Patrick Reusse (the Reusse column), and a series of letters to the editor. Each newspaper article was considered under both the fair and accurate reporting privilege and the First Amendment, but each claim was dismissed.
The Furst Report’s opening paragraph read, “Twins officials say Jason Gabbert, who chases baseballs thrown to fans in stands, has been disruptive, but he disagrees. One judge has already backed the team.” The appellant claimed that this phrasing, “would cause readers to think that a court had found that appellant deserved the trespass notice and that the allegations of misconduct in the Furst Report were credible.” The appellant pointed to Time, Inc. v. Firestone and Nixon v. Dispatch Printing Co., two case precedents that found the fair and accurate reporting privilege was forfeited to support his claims against the respondent. However, in the respective cases the privilege was lost because different, relevant facts in those cases “did not accurately report what the court had done” and a court could find “that the privilege does apply to any document that has ‘been presented to the court for its action.’” Therefore, since neither precedent appropriately applied, the court here concluded, “the Appellant’s argument—that both the inclusion of ‘additional contextual material’ in the Furst Report and the ‘omission of a pertinent fact, the court’s findings” from the Furst Report defeat the fair reporting privilege—is based on a misunderstanding of the privilege.’”
The Olson report was written similarly to the Furst report, but in regard to the appellant’s disruptive actions as a fan rather than his legal pursuits. The court, therefore, deemed the Olson report was also protected by the fair and accurate reporting privilege for parallel reasoning. Since the Olson report claim was not considered separately, but rather in conjunction with the Frust report’s decision, the appellant’s lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice so that the appellant could not refile.
When considering the Reusse Column and the letters to the editor, the court dismissed the appellant’s action by ruling that neither publication was actionable. The court relied upon McKee v. Laurion, which stated that if a statement, “cannot be reasonably interpreted as stating a fact and…cannot be proven true or false, ‘it constitutes non-actionable opinion and is protected under the First Amendment” in reaching its conclusion. Furthermore, the court reasoned, “when a speaker is expressing a subjective view, an interpretation, a theory, conjecture, or surmise, rather than claiming to be in possession of objectively verifiable facts, the statement is not actionable.”
Essentially what mattered to the court in this case regarding these claims was “the context of a statement…relevant to the determination of whether it is fact or opinion.” Since the court found the Reusse Column and the letters to the editor to be opinions these claims were decidedly non-actionable — a crucial determination to the ruling of this case.
More than one of the letters to the editor framed the appellant in an unfortunate light using phrases like “no desire to be a well-mannered, polite fan” as well as references like “baseball snatcher” and “narcissistic behavior,” which prompted him to respond with claims of defamation. Even though such usage of language may be insulting, the First Amendment protected these letters since they are opinions and therefore, non-actionable.
The court also noted that the “letters-to-the-editor section of a newspaper is ‘a forum for expressing opinions,’ and letters often express the writers’ opinions of what has appeared in the paper.”
Although McKee previously established that hyperbole is non-actionable as a matter of law, some of the appellant’s defamation claims were directly made in regard to hyperboles used in the letters. Specifically, the appellant alleged that references like “ashamed of his reported behavior” and the use of the word “crimes” were defamatory remarks by those who wrote to Star Tribune. However, the court dismissed these claims since none of the letters at issue rose to the level of defamation because only opinions, no facts, were asserted.
Lastly, the appellant argued that the Reusse Column, which referred to the appellant as “a Target Field ball hog triumphantly holding a foul ball after wrestling it from a 6-year-old girl,” still injured his reputation even if it did not meet the criteria for a defamation action. The court responded with rather blunt reasoning that if it used the standard by which the appellant proposed, “by that standard, anyone mentioned in any context, humorous or otherwise, as committing any ‘act of wrongdoing’ could claim defamation. That notion is contrary to the law and defies basic common sense.”
Upon considering the protections of the fair and accurate reporting privilege and the First Amendment the Court of Appeals of Minnesota affirmed the Hennepin County District Court decision to dismiss all actions originally brought the appellant, ceasing further challenges.
