The Great Lawsuit Lottery

An obscure news item this week reported that one Tony Bobulinski had his $30 million defamation suit agiant a FOX News anchor thrown out as meritless. What Bobulinski was complaining about was that the anchor, Jessica Tarlov, said on the air that Bobulinski’s legal fees to retain lawyer Stefan Passantino had been “paid by a Trump Super PAC". After hearing from Bobulinski’s lawyers, Tarlov issued a clarification the next day.

In dismissing the case, the judge found that Bobulinkski hadn’t shown Tarlov’s statements had damaged his reputation. He went on to say that “Connecting Bobulinski to the former—and future—democratically elected President of the United States simply cannot be grounds for an average American’s hatred, distrust, or ridicule." And. most importantly, the judge required the plaintiff to pay the defendant's legal fees, a rare step taken only in cases where the plainitff has been patently frivolous.

I wish the news media would give cases like this as much publicity as they give to high-profile cases involving huge verdicts. The media's failure to do so gives the average person the idea that people are getting rich over filing lawsuits. Even in the rare case where a huge verdict is obtained, collecting is quite another problem, as we have been seeing recently by the futile attempts to collect a defamation judgment from Rudy Guiliani.