A jury in Alabama on Thursday ruled that The New York Times defamed former Alabama basketball player Kai Spears and awarded him approximately $9.25 million in damages.
Ryan Phillips of the Tuscaloosa Patch reported on the verdict.
Spears’ lawsuit centered on how the Times wrongly reported that Spears was at the scene of a fatal shooting and whether the Times arguably getting the “gist” of the facts right was good enough.
Authored by Billy Witz, the March 15, 2023, story, “A Shooting That Ensnared Alabama Players Could Have Been Deadlier,” suggested it had a scoop with new reporting that Spears was at a shooting incident on Jan. 15, 2023, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., that killed Jamea Harris, a 23-year-old mother from Birmingham. The incident involved former Alabama basketball player Darius Miles allegedly retrieving a gun from the car of star player Brandon Miller, who was not accused of wrongdoing, and giving it to another man, Michael Davis, who was the shooter.
Among other things, the story expressed that Spears’ presence at the scene “had not been previously reported” and that neither of the two bullets that struck Miller’s car hit either Miller or Spears.
Spears, who later transferred to Marshall University, was not at the shooting. The Times reported that Spears was there based on information shared by an anonymous “person familiar with the case” who, it turned out, was mistaken. It appears Spears was confused with Cooper Lee, the manager of the Crimson Tide basketball team.
The story also described Spears as the “unidentified passenger” in a story section in which a reader might have drawn negative inferences about him. The story discussed how the school wanted the players to keep quiet and tried to distance itself from the incident. It also referenced a police detective who investigated the gun that had been transported in a car in which Spears was (mistakenly) reported to be a passenger.
In court filings, Spears has said he suffered from anxiety and distress because national media outlets repeated the Times’ error and described him as somehow connected to a shooting. The Times also took a couple of months to correct the story.
The Times maintains that its reporting was not defamatory because it didn’t accuse Spears of any wrongdoing and arguably portrayed him more as a victim, in that he was in a car that was struck by bullets. Defamation requires, among other things, statements that are untrue and highly offensive.
In addition, the Times has relied on the doctrine of substantial truth, which protects technically inaccurate statements if the “gist” or “sting” of the reporting is sufficiently accurate. Although Spears wasn’t with Miller at the time of the shooting, he was with Miller and other Crimson Tide players earlier in the evening. The Timesalso pointed out that Spears testified he texted a friend that “he was ‘involved’ in the shooting” because he had been interviewed about it, spent time with Miller and spoke with Lee who was upset about being in the car.
The Times also tried to debunk the idea that Spears suffered meaningful damages.
Spears, the Times wrote in a recent filing, “has offered no evidence of any lost wages or other pecuniary harm. In fact, the evidence at trial shows the opposite: he was given a scholarship in the season after the Article was published.” The Times also refers to Spears testifying that “people ‘rallied behind’ him at games.”
In May, U.S. District Judge Annemarie Carney Axon denied the Times’ motion for summary judgment. Sher reasoned that jurors should be able to decide whether statements about Spears were highly offensive. The judge stressed that Spears “was not in the car that brought the gun to the scene, did not follow Mr. Miller to the scene, did not know about the shooting until after it happened, and did not know that Mr. Miller had communicated with Mr. Miles.”
The Times could appeal the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
Spears v. The New York Times has significant implications for sports journalism. Coverage of legal controversies in sports can be difficult because of their complexity, especially amid industry pressures to “break news” and “be first.”
For more on this topic, you may read “The Gist of It: The Uneasy Triangle of Sports Journalism, Deadlines & Defamation Law,” which I co-authored with Samantha Chavez-Salinas and which was published this year in the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.