Word: suits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jane V. Anderson, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, * contended that she was the model for Joan Gilling, a central character in both the book and the movie. Claiming that the film defamed and humiliated her by presenting Gilling as a suicidal lesbian, she brought suit in a Boston federal court. The 14 individual and corporate defendants included Plath's widower, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who sold the movie rights of her novel for $60,000, as well as the filmmakers and two television companies that showed the movie, CBS and Time Inc.'s Home Box Office...
...book in 1971. She and Plath were longtime acquaintances. They both grew up in Wellesley, Mass.; both went on to Smith College, where at different times they even dated the same man. Both were mental patients during the same five months at McLean Hospital near Boston. Anderson's suit was prompted not by the book but by a scene in the movie that was invented by the filmmakers. It shows a suicidal Gilling making advances to Esther Greenwood, the fictional Plath. On the stand, Anderson said she found the seduction attempt "sickening beyond words and extremely objectionable...
...fact that her suit even came to trial, much less that it resulted in a semi-success, disturbed many writers and First Amendment experts. "The idea that the more you fictionalize, the more you falsify, the more liable you become is quite intolerable," argues Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe. Even though the settlement creates no binding precedent, any Anderson victory, says Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew), is "bad news for writers of fiction. It will open the floodgates for more cases like this...
...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 on the novel Touching. A California psychologist...
...recipients, by law the words remained his. In court, Salinger's lawyers argued that Hamilton went well beyond the "fair use" right of writers to describe or give examples of another's work. The two-judge appeals panel agreed, reversing a lower court that threw out Salinger's suit last November. The judges pointed out that the letters are used "on at least 40% of the book's 192 pages." Observing that the excerpts included "virtually all of the most interesting passages of the letters," they held that Salinger was entitled to protect his own opportunity to sell them...