An appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling dismissing a defamation lawsuit brought by birther publisher Joseph Farah and birther author Jerome Corsi over a satirical blog post published by Esquire about Corsi's 2011 fact-free fantasy tale Where's the Birth Certificate? The day after Corsi's book was released, writer Mark Warren wrote a satirical piece for Esquire's The Politics Blog that said that publisher Farah had taken the book off the market because, "at the end of the day, bullshit is bullshit." Farah and Corsi claimed--among other things--that the post was defamatory and hurt sales of Corsi's book. Today's appeals court ruling upholds the lower court ruling that the Esquire post was clearly satire and therefore was not defamatory.
The losers in this lawsuit were represented by a lawyer who is very familiar with losing--Larry Klayman, the guy who just last week tried to overthrow the US government with a throng of 100 angry teabaggers whining about socialism and Muslims. In response to today's ruling, Klayman told WorldNetDaily that his 100-teabagger peaceful revolution is now more necessary than ever because courts are not standing up for the little guy.
The court's ruling makes the point that no reasonable Esquire reader would believe that Farah disavowed the birther conspiracies given how steadfastly he has defended and promoted them in the past. The ruling states:
The essence of the fictitious story was that Farah, a self-described leader (along with Corsi) of the movement to challenge President Obama’s eligibility to serve, had suddenly and without any warning decided to recall and “pulp” the Corsi book the very day after it was released. The supposed basis for this decision was President Obama’s earlier release of his long-form birth certificate; yet that release occurred three weeks before Corsi’s book was published, and, as Farah acknowledges, he and Corsi remained (and still remain) committed to the book even after that event. After the release of the birth certificate, Farah appeared on MSNBC and published more than 40 articles on WorldNetDaily continuing to promote the book. [Internal citations omitted.]
Considering the blog post in its context, the reasonable reader could not understand Warren’s article to be conveying “real news” about Farah and Corsi. The article’s primary intended audience — that is, readers of “The Politics Blog” — would have been familiar with Esquire’s history of publishing satirical stories, with recent topics ranging from Osama Bin Laden’s television-watching habits to “Sex Tips from Donald Rumsfeld.”
In fact, on the very day the Esquire piece was published, Farah told
The Daily Caller that he assumed the piece was "very poorly executed parody." The trial court found this to be pretty compelling evidence that the piece was satire. Klayman, however, did not agree. In the October oral argument in the appeal (the mp3 is available
here), he said that, "Farah made a statement himself, off the cuff, that this was poorly executed parody,
meaning it wasn't parody at all." In the wingnut world that Klayman, Farah, and Corsi inhabit, this kind of logic abounds and people find it compelling. However, in the real world, it doesn't fly. Unsurprisingly, the appeals court judges did not agree with Klayman that Farah's statement that the Esquire piece was parody meant that it
wasn't parody.
In the same Daily Caller article, Esquire writer Mark Warren is quoted as calling author Jerome Corsi an "execrable piece of shit." The lawsuit alleged that this statement and others by Warren were defamatory because they made factual assertions that were not true. The appeals court ruling says this:
A reasonable reader would understand Warren’s statements to be expressions of his own opinion. His reference to Corsi as an “execrable piece of shit,” does not appear to convey any factual assertion, but is rather “the sort of loose, figurative or hyperbolic language which would negate the impression” that a factual statement was being made.
The appeals court ruled that calling Jerome Corsi an "execrable piece of shit" is not a factual assertion. Sigh.