Word: libeller
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...Coors boycott director, Dave Sickler, argues, "If our allegations are untrue, why haven't they sued us for libel?" Meanwhile, William Coors has offered $10,000 to anyone who can substantiate any of the charges against the company...
Even if works of the imagination could talk, they could never testify. Being fictional, how could they swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Nonetheless, a number of angry plaintiffs in recent years have brought libel suits charging that they were represented, and misrepresented, by fictional characters in stories, novels and films. The latest such suit, against the film version of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, ended last week with a court-endorsed settlement that sent a cautionary and somewhat paradoxical message: when you make things up, be sure to tell the truth...
...well-developed standard for judging the culpability of fiction; libel rulings have been concerned mostly with news reports. Real people have served as models for fictional characters, from Proust's Baron Charlus to Bellow's Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts...
...Libel plaintiff lawyers like Attorney Gerry Spence counter that the victims of a writer's vendetta or recklessness are entitled to recompense. "We must be free to fictionalize, but we can't hurt people with the exercise of our freedom," says Spence. Six years ago he represented a former Miss Wyoming, Kimerli Pring, in a suit against Penthouse, which ran a tale about the sexual feats of a fictional Miss Wyoming. Though an appeals court threw out the lower-court award of $12.5 million, the case sent a shiver through publishers. Another shudder had come with a 1979 decision...
...libel suit over The Bell Jar sends a paradoxical message to writers and filmmakers: when you make things up, tell the truth...