Melvin Avanzado is a lawyer in Los Angeles who writes the Entertainment Litigation Blog. He’s also a huge UCLA basketball fan.
So it was natural for him to weigh in on Reeve Nelson’ defamation suit against Sports Illustrated resulting from SI’s March 2012 article entitled, Special Report: Not the UCLA Way. The piece, written by Pulitzer Prize winning writer George Dohrmann, portrayed a UCLA basketball program in disarray. It focused heavily on Nelson’s “psychotic behavior” as a disrupting factor within the team.
Writes Avanzado:
Simply put, defamation lawsuits seek redress for supposed damages to a plaintiff’s reputation and prospects. Obviously, Nelson’s complaint paints a positive picture of his professional basketball aspirations and the damage to those aspirations (and Nelson’s reputation) as a result of the article. Whether such matters can be proven is another matter. In the lawsuit, Nelson seeks damages “at the minimal amount of $10,000,000.”
Avanzado writes the First Amendment skews heavily in favor of the defendant.
In this post, I have only scratched the surface of the many legal issues Nelson faces in his lawsuit. For example, even if Nelson proves that the article was “defamatory” and that the facts were false, Nelson must show that he was damaged by the article. At the time of its publication, Nelson’s negative conduct with the team had already been widely reported and he had already been kicked off the team.
Nelson’s professional basketball prospects and skills were also widely questioned, notwithstanding Nelson’s sometime stellar statistical output on the court. (As depicted above, Nelson ironically was SI’s cover boy for its college basketball preview edition for the west coast.) Finally, the First Amendment will even protect a reporter’s mistaken reporting — so long as the reporter had no reason to doubt that his publication was false. So it should suffice to say that odds makers would make defendants like SI heavy favorites in this kind of contest.
Avanzado questions whether the case ever will go to court:
One side note: the cost of pursuing a defamation cases is significant. Thus, such cases are sometimes filed to create an initial media frenzy that is favorable to the plaintiff. When that initial publicity dies down, the case is quietly dropped or settled — having done the job of generating some rehabilitating publicity. So it will be interesting to see if Nelson is serious about pursuing his lawsuit or whether it was filed simply to generate publicity.
And he concludes, showing he clearly isn’t a fan of Nelson, the basketball player:
The only clear conclusion at this early stage of the lawsuit is that, if Nelson pursues this case beyond the initial publicity he is generating from it, lots of time and money will be spent before the case is won or lost. If my prediction is correct — and Nelson survives the initial motions in the case — the case will take more than a year before a trial is likely — even longer, if interim appeals are taken from the decision on the anti-SLAPP motion.
In the meantime, current and former players and staff on the UCLA men’s basketball team will be reliving Nelson’s career at UCLA in depositions — and probably in the press. Frankly, that’s an era of UCLA basketball that fans (and probably the team) would rather forget.
