Is Jerry West’s Potential Lawsuit Against HBO Over His Portrayal in the Lakers Docudrama “Winning Time” a Jump Ball?

Previous thirty day period, HBO unveiled its new drama collection Successful Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty – based on the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman. To say that Jerry West, the previous head coach and GM of the Los Angeles Lakers dislikes the way he is portrayed in the HBO series Successful Time is an understatement. West calls his portrayal “false and defamatory” and he has publicly identified as for a retraction and an apology.  In a letter to HBO, West’s law firm claims that Profitable Time falsely and cruelly portrays West as an out-of-management, intoxicated, rage-aholic. West’s lawyer promises that the producers have committed the tort of fake light-weight invasion of privacy by generating a untrue impression about Mr. West that is really offensive and injurious to his standing and have also defamed Mr. West by attributing acts of rage to him that he hardly ever dedicated.

In De Havilland v. Fx Networks, LLC, Olivia De Havilland superior a fake gentle assert over her portrayal in the docudrama “Feud: Bette and Joan”. A wrong light declare is a style of invasion of privateness, dependent on publicity that places a particular person in the community eye in a untrue light-weight that would be very offensive to a sensible individual, and where the defendant understood or acted in reckless disregard as to the falsity of the publicized subject and the fake light in which the aggrieved individual would be placed.  A untrue gentle assert is equivalent to a libel declare, and its prerequisites are the same as a libel declare, such as evidence of malice. So, in purchase for West to prevail on each his fake mild assert and his defamation claim, he would have to reveal that his portrayal in Winning Time ended up (1) assertions of reality, (2) in fact bogus or generate a fake perception about him, (3) are highly offensive to a fair particular person or defamatory, and (4) made with actual malice. Genuine malice would be founded by demonstrating that HBO intentionally portrayed West in the hope of insinuating a defamatory import to the viewer, or that HBO knew or acted in reckless disregard as to no matter whether his portrayal would be interpreted by the normal viewer as a defamatory assertion of simple fact.

A single of the portrayals West promises to be defamatory was HBO’s depictions of his response to the drafting of Magic Johnson. The collection portrays West in the pursuing scenes about Magic Johnson – a single is West golfing with Jerry Buss, Monthly bill Shannan and Frank Mariani though talking about Magic Johnson and West is revealed kicking his golfing ball, acquiring a profanity laden outburst and storming off yet another demonstrates West yelling and breaking a golf club in excess of his knee and a third scene, having location after Magic Johnson was drafted, West is portrayed throwing his MVP trophy as a result of his workplace window in anger.

Right before the court docket even gets to the dilemma of irrespective of whether West’s portrayal is defamatory, the court would first have to establish whether or not his portrayal was significantly correct and if not, no matter whether scenes are statements of reality or the dramatized feeling of the producer.

Given that truth of the matter is a defense to a defamation assert, HBO would probable argue that West’s portrayal was significantly real. In determining no matter whether a statement is substantially correct, courts ordinarily look at the language or portrayal with the genuine reality to determine whether or not the truth would have a different impact on the mind of the common reader/viewer. Seemingly, West wasn’t totally confident that Magic could thrive as a issue guard and West desired Sidney Moncrief. Seemingly, West went as far as to try out to influence Jack Kent Cooke, the outgoing proprietor of the Lakers, not to draft Johnson.  Also, evidently in West’s autobiography, “My Charmed, Tormented Life”, he talked over purposefully breaking golfing clubs and Pat Riley witnessing him throwing his golf equipment about the fence of the Bel Air State Club. Can the producers choose these impartial details, dramatize and blend them, and continue to have this portrayal be substantially accurate?

If a assertion/portrayal is not truthful, then the most important thing to consider is no matter whether these an ordinary, realistic viewer, viewing the scenes in their original context, would conclude that they are statements of fact and not the dramatized view of the producer.  In accordance to the view of the De Havilland court docket, that might be a problem to set up. There the court docket claimed that “[v]iewers are typically familiar with dramatized, truth-centered movies and miniseries in which scenes, discussions, and even characters are fictionalized and imagined” and the point that a program “is a so-referred to as docudrama or historical fiction . . . may show that the quotations must not be interpreted as the real statements of the speaker to whom they are attributed”. Citing the Ninth Circuit case of Partington v. Bugliosi, the court docket concluded that most viewers of docudramas “are conscious by now that pieces of this kind of packages are much more fiction than reality.”

It seems that the courts in New York could not go as significantly as the California Court of Appeals did in De Havilland.  In Fairstein v. Netflix, the United States District Courtroom for the Southern District of New York declined to conclude that viewers of When They See Us would assume the system is “more fiction than fact” but fairly that the dialogue in the dramatization “is not a verbatim recounting of the genuine-everyday living contributors and is meant to capture the essence of their words and deeds.”

In accordance to the Fairstein courtroom, the critical to deciding the big difference in between non-actionable statements of viewpoint and actionable statements of details (or an view that indicates that it is primarily based on info which justify the view) is the implication that the statement is dependent on undisclosed information regarded to the defendants. The distinction among point and feeling is an concern of law for the courts, and the determination will be centered on the court’s evaluation of how the statement would be recognized by the common individual exposed to the assertion in its complete context.

Is West’s portrayal the unactionable, dramatized impression of the producers, or is his portrayal dependent on, or does it surface to the normal, affordable viewer to be based mostly on undisclosed points recognised to the producers? Although that will be for the court docket to decide, a variable to take into account is a scene in Successful Time in which Jerry Buss, speaking directly to the viewers, states “Jerry West, Head Mentor of the Lakers, regarded as a real gentleman of the sport to everyone who does not know him.” West’s legal professionals argue that the scene indicates that Winning Time depicts the “real” West. Nevertheless, there is a disclaimer at the beginning of Successful Time. Generally, disclaimers give the producer some home to claim that a work or components of a work are dramatized thoughts. Nevertheless, as the United States District Court for the Central District of California pointed out in Gaprindashvili v. Netflix (the Queens Gambit defamation suit), the presence of a disclaimer is a “factor in the assessment, albeit not a dispositive one particular.”

Observe this episode on the Weintraub YouTube channel, here.

Pay attention to the podcast version of this episode on your preferred platform or on-line, in this article.