Mother Jones Wins Ridiculous SLAPP Suit Filed By Billionaire...Who Still Claims Victory

From Mike Masnick with Techdirt:

"Mother Jones, the well-known, politically-focused publication, has prevailed in a ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by billionaire Frank VanderSloot. VanderSloot was upset about a 2012 profile that Mother Jones published about him, his multi-level marketing, dietary supplement company Melaleuca, and the millions of dollars he was donating to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. VanderSloot insisted that the article was defamatory, though you’ll have to squint really hard to figure out where and how. You can read the link above, or the court’s full ruling to get all of the background.

In short, though, most of it came down to the question of whether or not VanderSloot engaged in “gay-bashing” in attacking a local Idaho reporter who had exposed some problematic behavior of the Boy Scouts, involving a local leader who was accused of molesting boys. The Mother Jones article used that incident as a key point in its story about VanderSloot, describing some advertisements VanderSloot had taken out, which attacked the earlier story about the Boy Scouts, as “gay bashing” because the ads focused on the fact that the reporter in those original articles, Peter Zuckerman, was gay."

SLAPPs in the NewsEvan MascagniOctober 16, 2015SLAPPs in the News, Press & Media SLAPPs, Idaho1 Comment