Justice Alexander Hunter Jr.
Defendants moved for dismissal of plaintiffs’ amended verified complaint seeking compensatory and punitive damages for defamation, and defamation-mixed questions of law and fact. Plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ statements, including describing Nash as a "little hippy, dippy chick," was defamatory, humiliating and injurious to her reputation as a "serious businesswoman." Defendants argued that no reasonable viewer of the segments could have understood the statements to refer to plaintiffs as neither plaintiff was mentioned by name. They also asserted the allegedly defamatory statements were constitutionally protected as pure opinion, thus non-actionable. The court agreed that taken as a whole in the context of a television segment featuring excessive spending at a conference, it could not be said the subject statements referred to plaintiff. It noted none of the statements implied any wrongdoing by plaintiffs, ruling figurative and hyperbolic statements, even if deprecating plaintiff, were not actionable. The statement referring to Nash as a "little hippy, dippy chick" was an expression of opinion having no precise meaning and could not be proven objectively true or false, and plaintiffs’ defamation claims were dismissed.
