A 12-member jury ruled on June 2 that the Columbia City Paper libeled local attorney Rebecca West and awarded her $40,000 in damages.

“I feel completely vindicated,” says West, who handles divorce and other family law cases. “The loose ends have now been tied up in my mind.”

The jury determined that the City Paper defamed West in an article it published Oct. 24, 2007. The story was about a divorce between Whit-Ash Furniture Co. owner Harold Whitney Black and his then-wife Stella Black.

In her lawsuit, West took issue with passages in the article that she believes referred to her. The sections included “two-bit lawyers who’ll even turn on their own clients if the retainer is juicy enough” and “corruptible attorneys.”

West also says the story incorrectly identified her as Stella Black’s “entertainment lawyer” and that the place where her name was introduced in the story, at the top of the middle column, exacerbated the damage to her reputation by making it more likely that people would see it.

Many people did, including some of her professional colleagues, family members and friends, West says.

After deliberating for about two hours, the jury awarded West $10,000 in actual damages and $30,000 in punitive damages. The trial lasted two days.

The defendants in the case were City Paper Publisher and majority owner Paul Blake, 32; City Paper co-owner and Editor-in-Chief Todd Morehead, 33; and the publication itself, which is published every other week.

Morehead wrote the story. “It’s not been fun,” he says of the case.

Any post-trial motions the defendants wanted to file, such as a request for the damages to be lowered or thrown out, were due June 10.

“We’re definitely going to be appealing the jury’s decision, for sure,” Blake says. “We’re pretty confident the First Amendment will prevail.”

Jake Moore, an attorney in West Columbia, represented West. “We’ll certainly respond to whatever they move,” Moore says. He says he doesn’t think the defendants have much room for an appeal. “We thought we had a very strong case going in,” Moore says.
Moore and West say the City Paper did not try to contact her for comment prior to publishing the story.

Blake confirms that. “The story was never really about her, so that’s correct,” he says.
The paper also declined to print a retraction when Moore requested one, according to Moore and West.

Blake says the publication ran a clarification stating that the passages in question did not refer to any specific attorney and offered West space in its pages to respond to the story. “There’s no conspiracy against Rebecca West,” he says.

Says West of the clarification, “It wasn’t even addressing what I found to be offensive.”

For the City Paper, a scrappy, bomb-throwing alternative newspaper that has tried with middling results to carve out a niche in the Columbia market, the jury verdict is a punishing blow.

“We’re hoping the paper is going to take care of that part of it,” Morehead says of the $40,000 in damages. “But, you know, we’ll see how it goes.”

Moore says he will exercise the full range of options to collect the money.
 
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