Fisher v. Offit [1]

On December 23, 2009 Barbara Loe Fisher filed a complaint in federal district court of Virginia against Dr. Paul Offit, Conde Nast Publications (the publisher of Wired Magazine) and Amy Wallace (a writer for Wired) for defamation, seeking damages of $1 million.

Ms. Fisher is a public speaker, advocate and founder of the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit organization "dedicated to the prevention of vaccine injuries and deaths through public education." Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and an expert on immunology and vaccines. In a profile of Dr. Offit that ran in the November 2009 issue of Wired Magazine, Amy Wallace quoted Dr. Offit and wrote:

"Kaflooey theories" make him crazy, especially if they catch on. Fisher, who has long been the media's go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call "parents rights," makes him particularly nuts, as in "You just want to scream." The reason? "She lies," he says flatly. "Barbara Loe Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I'm in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids.

In the complaint, Ms. Fisher argued that the statement "she lies" constituted libel per se because it portrayed her as a "person lacking honesty and integrity, making her a person to be shunned or excluded by those who seek information and opinion. . . ." (Compl. ¶ 29)

The judge dismissed the claim against all three defendants on March 10, 2010, writing that "a remark by one of the key participants in a heated public health debate stating that his adversary ‘lies' is not an actionable defamation." As to Dr. Offit, given that the context of the statement was of an "emotional and highly charged debate about an important public issue," the statement was understood as an "outpouring of exasperation" and was a protected expression of opinion. For Ms. Wallace and Conde Nast Publications, the "impassioned response by Defendant Offit toward Plaintiff was itself illustrative of the rough-and-tumble nature of the controversy over childhood inoculations and therefore worthy of mention of the Wired article, which sought to highlight, among other things, the intense nature of the vaccine debate."  Slip Op., No. 09-CV-1398 (E.D. Va. Mar. 10, 2010).