Masson v. New Yorker Magazine

In Masson v. New Yorker Magazine (1991) 501 U.S. 496, a noted psychoanalyst sued the publisher and author of a magazine article and book which contained lengthy passages attributed to him in quotation marks. Masson objected to these errors before the publication of both the magazine and the book. The trial court granted summary judgment for the defendants, based on its determination that the alleged inaccuracies were substantially true or were rational interpretations of ambiguous conversations, thus there was no actual malice. The Court of Appeals affirmed, but the United States Supreme Court reversed. The high court disagreed with the lower courts' conclusion that "an altered quotation is protected so long as it is a 'rational interpretation' of the actual statement." (Masson, supra, 501 U.S. at p. 518.) The court explained: "Where . . . a writer uses a quotation, and where a reasonable reader would conclude that the quotation purports to be a verbatim repetition of a statement by the speaker, the quotation marks indicate that the author is not involved in an interpretation of the speaker's ambiguous statement, but attempting to convey what the speaker said." (Id. at p. 520.) The court had access to tape-recorded interviews that the author did with Masson, therefore it could compare Masson's actual statements with the quoted passages. The high court concluded that some of the published passages differed materially from the tape-recorded statements, and could be considered damaging.