Dixie Chicks member Natalie Maines has made a surprising admission that may weaken her defense against a libel lawsuit -– she never read the 200-page court document which she cited in implicating a man in a triple-murder case.

Natalie Maines

Terry Hobbs of Memphis sued Maines in November, alleging she libeled him in an open letter posted on the Dixie Chicks' website which “taken as a whole, accused Plaintiff of committing the murder[s]” of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin were convicted of the sensational murders in 1994.

As a defense, Maines has asserted the common-law privilege which applies to a fair and accurate report of information in a public document. Her letter describes evidence from a habeas corpus petition “showing that Damien Echols was wrongfully convicted.”

But Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the victims, argues that Maines has lost the protection of the fair report privilege because, in response to his request for admissions, she said she did not read the memorandum in support of the habeas petition or the exhibits attached to the memorandum before she posted her letter online in November 2007.

“In short, Pasdar [Maines' married name] has admitted that she did not bother to read the document about which she claims to be making a 'fair report,'” Hobbs says in a motion for partial summary judgment. “It is basic and obvious that reading a pleading is reasonably necessary to [e]nsure that a report regarding such pleading is accurate and complete.”

Under the Restatement of Torts, the fair report privilege is lost only by a “showing of fault in failing to do what is reasonably necessary to insure that the report is accurate and complete or a fair abridgment.”

Echols' attorneys filed his habeas petition a month before Maines published her letter. She said, among other things, that DNA evidence included in the' petition showed a hair belonging to Hobbs was found in a ligature used to strangle one of the victims.

The media reported extensively on the petition -– the Arkansas Democrat Gazette ran a story under the headline, “New evidence arises in 1993 triple murder” -- and, if Maines relied on those reports, she could argue that she did enough to ensure her letter was accurate.

"There might be a circumstance where it is reasonable to rely on what someone else says, but this case is not that circumstance," Hobbs' attorney J. Cody Hiland of Conway, Ark., tells On Point. "Ms. Pasdar implied she had read what had been filed and encouraged others to check for themselves."

As another basis for summary judgment, Hobbs says the “fair report doctrine requires that the report be regarding a judicial action, not merely a pleading ... In that Pasdar claims to be reporting what the pleadings filed by Echols said, rather than reporting on action taken the government, her statements are not privileged as a matter of law.”

In Butler v. Hearst-Argyle Television, 49 S.W.3d 116 (2001), the Arkansas Supreme Court quoted the Restatement of Torts as saying that “a report of a judicial proceeding implies that some official action has been taken by the officer or body whose proceedings are thus reported.” But it declined to reach the merits of whether the fair report privilege applies to pleadings.

Moreover, since judicial actions are based on pleadings, such a narrow reading of the privilege would be absurd.

Maines says in her admissions that after viewing HBO's "Paradise Lost" documentaries about the murders, she believed that Echols and his co-defendants “did not kill Michael Moore, Christopher Byers and Steve Branch and that they should receive, at minimum, a new trial.”

By Matthew Heller
7/6/09