Libel suit against The N&O and a former reporter ends with a confidential settlement
A libel suit brought by a State Bureau of Investigation employee against The News & Observer and a former reporter has been settled out of court.
Attorneys for The News & Observer Publishing Co., reporter Mandy Locke and SBI agent Beth Desmond agreed to the settlement this month, nearly a decade after Desmond first sued.
Desmond’s attorney, Jim Johnson, confirmed the settlement but said the terms were confidential and provided no details. Johnson said the parties were “mutually satisfied” with the outcome.
“We’re mutually pleased,” he said in an interview. “We’re certainly pleased that it’s done and over with.”
‘Agents’ Secrets’ series
The case had made it to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in August that The N&O and Locke had libeled Desmond in a four-part series about the work of the SBI called “Agents’ Secrets” in 2010. The court also affirmed compensatory damages of $1.5 million.
But the Supreme Court agreed with attorneys for Locke and The N&O that the Wake County jury that heard the case was given incomplete instructions about assessing punitive damages. The jury had awarded Desmond $7.5 million in punitive damages, but a state cap reduced that number to $4.5 million.
The justices said a Wake County court would have to hold another trial to determine punitive damages in the case. The two sides were preparing for that trial when they agreed to attempt to settle the case through mediation, Johnson said.
That effort was successful, and Johnson filed a motion with the Supreme Court on Monday to have the suit dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning the case is over for good.
Attorneys for The N&O declined to comment Monday. An attorney for Locke did not return a phone message.
Case dates back nearly a decade
Desmond, a firearms examiner, first sued The N&O and several reporters and editors in 2011, claiming that the paper’s series about the SBI included “false, despicable and defamatory statements” about her. She claimed one of the articles suggested she had falsified evidence in a Pitt County case that led to a murder conviction in 2006.
After Desmond withdrew the case and refiled it a year later, a Wake County judge allowed it to go forward but limited its scope and the defendants to The N&O, McClatchy and Locke.
The case went to trial in 2016, with the jury ruling in Desmond’s favor. The N.C. Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s verdict in 2018, concluding that evidence “tended to show that the primary objective” of Locke and The N&O was “sensationalism rather than truth.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in late 2019. The N&O argued that the lower court rulings had violated the legal precedent set in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court libel case New York Times v. Sullivan, which said public officials must establish that journalists acted with “actual malice” toward them, rather than simply published false information.
But Johnson told the justices that there was enough evidence presented at the trial for a jury to conclude there was actual malice toward Desmond. The justices agreed.
This story was originally published January 25, 2021 at 5:28 PM.
