BOSTON – Barbara Walters did not defame her daughter’s former classmate in a memoir by referring to her during discussions of the daughter’s troubled youth, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has ruled.

Nancy Shay sued Walters over passages in “Audition: A Memoir” describing trouble Shay and Walter’s daughter, Jacqueline Guber, now Jacqueline Guber Danforth, got into during their time at Wykeham Rise School in Washington, Conn., around 1983, and about Shay’s subsequent expulsion.