The Iowa Freedom of Information Council is arguing against the award of damages in a libel case where the plaintiffs showed no evidence of harm to their reputation.
In June 2021, a Polk County jury awarded $8 million to a Polk County man and his daughter in a defamation case against their neighbor, former Des Moines lawyer Jaysen McCleary. The plaintiffs had alleged McCleary had wrongfully claimed the man sexually molested his own daughter.
The Iowa Court of Appeals reversed that decision when it found the district court erred by denying a trial continuance McCleary had sought for health reasons. The case was remanded to district court for a new trial to assess damages, resulting in the father and daughter being awarded a combined $57,000 in compensatory damages for emotional distress, plus $570,000 in punitive damages. The district court then reduced the punitive-damage award to $55,000.
That decision is being appealed and cross-appealed, and this week the Iowa Freedom of Information Council weighed in through a friend-of-the-court brief, arguing that such damages shouldn’t be permitted in libel cases that involve non-media defendants and where there’s been no showing of reputational harm.
“The juries that tried this matter were instructed to assess damages for (McCleary’s) speech,” the council argues in its brief to the court. “So, unlike most any other tort case, plaintiffs’ injury was presumed, and jurors were charged only with calculating how much to give them in damages for libel. Yet the evidence demonstrated these plaintiffs had incurred no injury to reputation. The resultant awards accordingly arose without proof of an otherwise essential element of a defamation claim and provided compensation for hurt feelings only.”
The council argues the two jury awards in the McCleary case contradict the directive of the Iowa Civil Jury Instructions on libel damages, which tell jurors that “damages must be limited to those which naturally result from the defendant’s statement.”
The council argues the district court’s own rulings in the case “establish the irrefutable fact that the plaintiffs did not incur any injury to reputation from the statements they claim defamed them.”
As evidence of that conclusion, the council cites post-trial rulings in which the district court asserted that “there was no evidence that either plaintiff suffered any reputational damage,” and that there was “no testimony that any individual believed” any of the statements made by McCleary.
“The district court made findings and rulings that the record lacked proof of the very essence of a libel action, which is injury to reputation,” the council argues in its brief.
As part of that same brief, the council says it hopes to add a “distinct public policy voice to the debate” on free-speech protection that is “afforded everyday Iowans sued for defamation, especially now that libel per se verdicts in the state regularly surpass the $1 million mark.”
The council argues the district court’s decision — confirming no injury to the plaintiffs’ reputation while endorsing the recovery of damages — “defies logic and offends the widely accepted principle that courts redress injury rather than reward favored litigants with a windfall.”
In its friend-of-the-court brief, the council also notes that it is acting “in support of free speech generally, rather than for or against any speaker or subject.” In fact, the council says it “renounces the conduct of the parties, including how each has used libel law and the judicial system as armaments to wage personal war.”
The council also notes that McCleary unsuccessfully pursued lawsuits against the Des Moines Register, one of its founding members, and former Register reporter Clark Kauffman, now with the Iowa Capital Dispatch, for a series of stories about McCleary’s use of the court system.
