Latrell Sprewell, the former New York Knick who was essentially blacklisted from basketball because of his reputation as a sulky and selfish player, has scored a victory against one of the entities responsible for that reputation, the New York Post.
In a $40 million defamation case stemming from a series of articles the Post published about Sprewell in October 2002, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Marcy S. Friedman has granted Sprewell's motion to preclude the newspaper from relying on confidential sources in its summary judgment motion and, consequently, denied in part the paper's motion for summary judgment.
"The confidential sources were the only basis for the potentially defamatory statements in the articles that plaintiff fractured his hand when he swung at a guest on his boat, missed, and hit a wall," Justice Friedman held in Sprewell v. NYP Holdings, 0122923/02.
"The identity of the confidential sources is thus clearly material to this action as it bears directly on the issue of malice -- specifically, whether the confidential eyewitnesses were reliable sources for the articles or whether defendants' reliance upon them showed a reckless disregard for the truth," Friedman ruled. "This court [finds] that defendants have put the [Shield Law's] privilege in issue, and that they may not rely on the confidential sources in support of their showing on their summary judgment motion that they did not act with malice."
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