ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 28, 1997 TAG: 9702280059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
AN OFFENSIVE TITLE appeared in the Collegiate Times, but no reasonable reader would have thought the statement true of a Tech administrator, the judge said.
A judge has dismissed a Virginia Tech administrator's $850,000 defamation lawsuit against the student newspaper, filed last year after the Collegiate Times printed the title "Director of Butt Licking" beneath the administrator's name.
"I felt all along that no reasonable reader could read this and say they've intentionally said something bad about this lady," said Roanoke lawyer Dan Brown, who represented the Collegiate Times.
S.D. Roberts Moore, attorney for plaintiff Sharon D. Yeagle, could not be reached late Thursday for comment. Yeagle, assistant to the vice president for student affairs, had no comment.
"I'm relieved," was the reaction Thursday from Katy Sinclair, the paper's editor in chief.
The April 30, 1996, story, headlined "Tech Sends Seven Students to Governor's Fellows Program," discussed the record number of candidates from Tech selected to participate in the program. The paper printed a break-out statement in bold type, attributed to Yeagle, and printed the title "Director of Butt Licking" beneath her name.
Editors from the student paper said in May that the phrase was part of a computer template that never was meant to be published. The template has been changed.
Yeagle's lawsuit said the article contained "false and defamatory statements about her" that charge her with "the commission of a crime involving moral turpitude and therefore constitutes defamation."
She also said the paper had injured her in her capacity as an employee of Virginia Tech. Yeagle "suffered damage to her reputation, suffered shame, humiliation, embarrassment, ridicule, exposure to public infamy" and financial loss, according to her lawsuit.
In his ruling Thursday, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Ray Grubbs said he had closely scrutinized the context of the article "and determines that no reasonable person could conclude that such title or phrase conveys factual information that Ms. Yeagle is accused of committing any crime, much less any 'crime against nature.'''
He also found that the phrase "has no literal meaning.''
"It would be unreasonable to interpret this title as conveying directly or by inference, any defamatory, factual information about the plaintiff," the judge wrote.
Grubbs also called the Collegiate Times article "serious" and "noteworthy" and said the "title at issue is totally inconsistent with the context of the article. The use of the title is too absurd to be taken seriously."
But Grubbs did say that "Ms. Yeagle could easily find the use of this title to be personally offensive and repulsive. This court certainly does not condone its use."
The April 30 issue was the last one of the school year. One of the paper's editors sent Yeagle an apology letter, Brown said. A correction was published in the next issue, which came out in July, Sinclair said.
"The lesson for our client, a student newspaper, is, if you are using [a computer template] with some inside humor, ugly names or titles and so on, just as fun and never plan to publish, if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong," Brown said.
Sinclair has taken that lesson to heart.
"For the past year that I was editor, I double-checked and triple-checked," she said. "Which is good, I guess, because that's what everybody does in the real world."
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