UNITED STATES
The Jewish Week
02/25/16
Amy Sara Clark
Deputy Managing Editor
Sam Kellner’s defamation suit against The Jewish Daily Forward lives to fight another day.
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Debra A. James denied the newspaper’s motion to dismiss in a decision issued today, ruling that Kellner is a private person, not a public figure as The Forward had argued. The distinction is key because that means Kellner only needs to show that The Forward acted negligently rather than with actual malice.
The subject of the suit, brought by Kellner in November 2014, is an article written by Paul Berger, “Sam Kellner’s Tangled Hasidic Tale of Child Sex Abuse, Extortion and Faith,” and a tweet, mistakenly referring to Kellner as a convicted extortionist. According to Kellner’s complaint, the tweet went uncorrected by the paper for six days after they were alerted to the error.
The Forward sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the article was opinion, and thus protected speech. It also argued that the mistaken language of the tweet was inadvertent and not intended to defame Kellner.
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