Plaintiff TestMasters sued Blueprint and a number of
principals, who used to be TestMasters employees, for breach of duty and
related shenanigans. Defendants
committed really extensive discovery violations, for which they were
sanctioned, and lost on a number of claims at trial, though the sanction award
substantially exceeded the damages awarded by the jury. I’m only going to
discuss the defamation claims, though the breach of duty etc. claims make juicy
reading.
The jury found that two individual defendants, Triplett and
Riley, along with Blueprint (the business) defamed TestMasters on pre-law/law
school discussion sites. The court found
that there wasn’t substantial evidence to support the jury’s defamation
verdict: although defendants lied about having taken TestMasters’ classes, the
nasty things they said based on those lies weren’t themselves defamatory.
The claim against Triplett was based on a statement that she
posted, pretending to be a student who’d taken a TestMasters class the previous
summer:
Be careful if taking TM. I took it
last summer at UCLA and my instructor was awful, really boring and thick
accent. Actually answered questions
wrong in class and would try to talk his way out of it. Trent was teaching next door and he sounded
awesome, his class looked much better but theywouldn't let me switch, said it
was full. I heard there are a couple
other good instructors but i forgot their names. Probably taking the class over so Im gonna try
to get in trents this time.
Triplett testified that, though she didn’t take the class,
she sat in on a class from an instructor who spoke with such a “very thick
southern accent” that “it was difficult at times to hear what he was
saying.” Triplett stated that Harrison
incorrectly diagrammed a problem on the board, and then “instead of sort of
stepping back he actually tried to explain why that was the correct way to
diagram it.”
Riley made a post in response to a student who had taken a
TestMasters class from Teti (one of the perfidious defendants) and felt that
Teti was “a f-ing jackingass” and “arrogant.”
Riley, pretending also to be a student who took a TestMasters class from
Teti, wrote:
Wow mimi323. I was in a TM UCLA class close to that time
with Trent (I took him for the December test) and all I can say is that there's
no accounting for taste. No offense, and I'm sorry you got that vibe, but I had
a really different experience.
First off, my original teacher
(whose name I wish I knew but blocked out) was terrible- and a lot of people
thought he was just boring and shitty.
… [M]y class sucked so I basically
brided/bullied TM office people to transfer me into his class.
[more praise of Teti]
… And judging from the fact that
his class had more than 100 people in it for the last lesson when my original
class had dwindled to about 10 people by that point, I'm not alone.
Riley testified that he did not have an original TestMasters
class that “sucked” and was “boring and bad,” and that his post actually
referred to an experience that two of his friends at the time (whose last names
he could not remember) told him they had in a TestMasters class at UCLA. Riley
stated that the post was “a true experience of a lot of TestMasters students at
that time period,” but not for him. His
statements about switching classes, and the related claim that he raised his
LSAT score 20 points, were also false.
TestMasters argued that Triplett’s false “first-hand”
account of her instructor’s competence and TestMasters’ unwillingness to let
her switch into Teti’s class were provably false, as were Riley’s statements
that his original class dwindled to about 10 people. This wasn’t support for the jury’s verdict.
Whether a statement contains or implies a provably false
factual claim is a question of law, unless the statement could be interpreted
either innocently or libelously; that exception didn’t apply here. In the context of a discussion board,
statements that TestMasters instructors were “awful,” “really boring,”
“terrible,” “boring,” “shitty,” and “bad,” and they “sucked” couldn’t be
statements of fact or imply provably false assertions of fact. They were classic statements of opinion that
couldn’t be proven true or false. The
accusations of incompetence weren’t made by experts with special skill or
knowledge, whose statements might seem more factual. Since the comments were anonymous, readers
wouldn’t know about Triplett’s experience with LSAT instruction. And anyway, determining whether a teacher is
boring doesn’t usually require expertise.
Some of the statements were or implied provably false assertions
of fact: that a TestMasters instructor answered questions incorrectly in class and tried
to talk his way out of it; that TestMasters refused to allow Triplett to
transfer classes; and that Riley’s class shrunk in size over time from 100 to
10 students because it was so bad that 90 percent of the students left. But TestMasters didn’t introduce evidence
that these statements were false, as it had to do given that LSAT prep is a
matter of public concern. TestMasters
didn’t point to record evidence that the teacher didn’t teach incorrectly, or that it did allow transfers. (This
last bit seems wrong: Triplett said she
wasn’t allowed to transfer, and this was false because she wasn’t in the class. It seems to me that all that’s needed to show
falsity is that she wasn’t in the class and thus couldn’t have been
refused a transfer.) Nor did TestMasters
introduce evidence that its class didn’t dwindle, and Riley testified that he
was taking the experience of “a lot of TestMasters students” as his own. Counsel asked Riley, “So that's false then
where you said that you had a [Testmasters] class that sucked, right?” He said, “right,” but then explained in the
rest of his answer that the statement about the class was true, and the only
part that was not true was that he had taken the class.
The court noted that “the statements by Triplett and Riley
that they were TestMasters students were very provably and indeed admittedly
false assertions of fact, but they are not defamatory.” Thus, the awards on the defamation claims
were struck. (At the very least, a false advertising claim would proceed differently
in that the defendants clearly made false establishment claims—their substantiation,
that they had actually taken the classes, was admittedly false.)
No comments:
Post a Comment