Craig “Owl” Chapman has surfed some of Hawaii's mightiest waves. But he crashed out in a federal court as a jury found a surfing magazine did not defame him by allegedly portraying him as a “degenerate, pathetic, and drug addled social outcast.”

The case made waves in the surfer community, pitting representatives of two surf meccas against each other. On one side was Owl, a legend on the North Shore of Oahu, and on the other, The Surfer's Journal, a high-end, glossy magazine published in San Clemente, Calif.

Owl reportedly has said he brought the lawsuit so the surf media would “grow up and quit acting like teen mags in fantasyland.” But after a six-day trial, a jury in Honolulu decisively rejected his claim that freelance writer Jeff Johnson fabricated a profile of him entitled “El Hombre Invisible” which ran in the August-September 2006 issue of The Surfer's Journal.

“It’s a complete victory for the defendants and a strong affirmation of the media’s right to write about public figures,” said Jeffrey S. Portnoy, an attorney for the magazine.

Johnson's story details his frustrating experience purchasing a custom single-fin surfboard from Owl sometime in the mid-1990s. He relied on his memory and journals he kept at the time, testifying he did not contact Owl while researching the article because he wanted to provide a third-person view of him, rather than Owl's perception of himself.

In one of several references to cult author William S. Burroughs, the story describes Owl's board-shaping room as “Naked Lunch meets Through the Looking Glass.” Owl is quoted as calling world surf champion Kelly Slater a “little fucker” and, for “Liner Notes” accompanying the story, The Surfer's Journal editor Steve Pezman interviewed surfer Jackie Baxter about Owl.

“I heard he's been sober for the last year,” he quoted Baxter as saying. “One year out of 40? ([L]aughing[.]) That's good!”

For Owl, the article was far from a hoot. In a complaint filed in January 2007, he said he never shaped a surfboard for Johnson at any time in the mid-1990s and called the article a “ridiculously extreme portrait” which

points to a grandiose egotist who is mean-spirited, self-serving, full of braggadocio, impossibly arrogant and, in the end, a degenerate, pathetic, and drug addled social outcast.

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright summarily dismissed much of the case in December, allowing Owl to go to trial only on statements implying he did not deliver the board to Johnson on time and according to Johnson's specifications; a quote referring to an altercation Owl allegedly had with another surfer; and the “little fucker” and Baxter quotes.

“[The court cannot unequivocally find that attributing a quote to Plaintiff calling Kelly Slater ... a 'little fucker' would not injure his reputation as a surfer or surfboard shaper as a matter of law,” Seabright said.

But in its verdict, the jury found none of the statements were false -– and so never even got to the issue of whether they were defamatory.

Owl was seeking some $600,000 in special damages along with unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Whether he could have shown any injury to his reputation is unclear since a reasonable juror -– perhaps schooled on Sean Penn's character in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” -- might consider “degenerate” and “drug addled” a benign way of describing a surfer.

Johnson testified that he misplaced or threw out most of his journals before Owl filed the suit. In the summary judgment ruling, Seabright found his use of narrative, figurative statements and opinion were not actionable and

to the extent Plaintiff maintains that the references to Burroughs and his literary works imply that Plaintiff is a murderer or a “sexual deviant,” that argument is far too attenuated to support his claims.

By Matthew Heller
3/8/09