Robbins v. Pacific Newspaper Group Inc. et al.
From Ad IDEM / CMLA
November 28, 2005
On June 7, 2001, the Vancouver Sun ran a front page story stating that multi-millionaire/self-help guru, Tony Robbins, had “stolen” the wife of Langley resident John Lynch. According to the article, Lynch’s wife met Robbins after taking one of his seminars, and that this ultimately resulted in the breakdown of the Lynchs’ marriage. The story also stated that Robbins’ ex-wife had sought a restraining order against him “to prevent him from using their joint company’s funds to buy lavish gifts for his new girlfriend including breast implants.” Robbins, who counsels millions of people on self-help topics including how to survive rocky marriages, sued the Sun as well as other corporate media defendants that ran variations of the story and two primary sources of the story for libel.
Justice Williamson of the Supreme Court of British Columbia reviewed the inferential meanings presented by the plaintiff, some of which were admitted by the defendants, and then went on to evaluate whether these meanings were defamatory. He found that the inferential meaning that Robbins was a hypocrite for failing to practice what he preaches was defamatory and that defendants had not met the onus of proving it was true. Justice Williamson also found it to be defamatory to say that Robbins’ ex-wife had sought a restraining order against her husband and that this could not be justified since there was no evidence that any such application had been made. Other inferential meanings were rejected by the Court.
The Court took a short look at the principle of “bane and antidote,” this being “the idea that the harm of something negative about the plaintiff may be cancelled or assuaged by the words in another part of the article or broadcast,” [para. 61] but rejected its applicability to this case.
Justice Williamson concluded with a detailed assessment of damages based on principles outlined in Leenan v. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (2000), 48 O.R. (3rd) 656 (S.C.J.). His award was based primarily on the fact that the plaintiff did not testify, and as such found that only a modest sum of $20,000 could be awarded against the defendants. The award was joint and several against all the print media defendants since they were all represented by the same counsel, all took the same positions and raised the same defences. An injunction was also granted requiring the print media to remove the relevant articles from the electronic database.
During the trial the plaintiff discontinued its action against Lynch, who was one of the two individual defendants, after his counsel read an apology on his behalf. Damages of $500 were awarded against the second individual defendant after his own apology was taken into account.
