Melinda Duckett

A Florida judge's ruling in a wrongful-death suit against CNN and talk-show host Nancy Grace is the second defeat for a TV network this year in a case involving a suicide that allegedly resulted from “ambush” journalism.

The grandparents of Melinda Duckett sued CNN in November 2006 for intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED), alleging Grace turned an interview into an ambush by aggressively questioning her about the disappearance of her two-year-old son. Duckett killed herself a day after taping the interview.

IIED claims are only actionable in the rare circumstance of conduct that was “so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency.” And CNN argued in a motion to dismiss that Grace was only practicing “aggressive newsgathering.”

But Senior U.S. District Judge W. Terrell Hodges denied the motion last week, finding that the plaintiffs have “sufficiently alleged all of the elements of an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim.”

CNN allegedly knew, he explained in his order, that Duckett was “already suffering emotional and psychological stress from the disappearance of her son,” and

where the alleged conduct on the part of the Defendants may not be considered outrageous when the victim is of ordinary emotional and mental status, such conduct may become actionable (and liability may exist) when the alleged victim suffers from known emotional and/or psychological trauma.

While Hodges stressed he was applying the “lenient notice pleading standard,” his expansive view of IIED liability duplicates that of a New York judge who ruled in February that NBC Universal could be sued for causing the suicide of a Texas prosecutor. Conradt v. NBC Universal, 536 F.Supp.2d 380.

Louis Conradt shot himself as an NBC camera crew waited outside his home to film his arrest for a segment of the “To Catch a Predator” show. In denying NBC's motion to dismiss, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said the network “knew or should have known that Conradt was peculiarly susceptible to emotional distress and suicide.”

Hodges relied in part on Williams v. City of Minneola, 575 So. 2d 683 (1991), in which a Florida appeals court upheld IIED claims against police officers accused of improperly viewing a videotape of an autopsy. “[O]ur society ... shows a particular solicitude for the emotional vulnerability of survivors regarding improper behavior toward the dead body of a loved one,” the court noted.

Whether CNN should have showed a “particular solicitude” toward the emotionally vulnerable mother of a missing toddler –- who was part of a national news story -- appears to be a quite different question from that addressed in Williams.

After Judge Chin's decision, NBC settled the Conradt case. Unless CNN reaches a similar settlement, Duckett's grandparents will now have an opportunity to question Grace and her producers about their pre-interview discussions with Duckett.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs alleged Duckett was misled into believing the interview would help in the search for her missing child when, in fact, “the real purpose of the show ... was to try to obtain a confession as to 'where she was' on the night that [the child] disappeared.”