Malpractice Claim Allowed for Failure to Sue Over Faked-Cancer Statement
A Manhattan federal magistrate has refused to toss a lawsuit against a law firm that failed to sue for defamation on behalf of a client whose employer said in a news release that she had faked her cancer to avoid getting fired.
The law firm, Thompson Wigdor & Gilly, claimed the employer’s statements were nonactionable opinion, the New York Law Journal reports. The firm had represented marketing executive Michelle Joyce in an unsuccessful discrimination suit against her former employer, the hip-hop magazine The Source.
The magazine’s co-owner, Raymond Scott, was quoted as saying that Joyce “didn’t even do nothing around here” and “faked that she was having breast cancer so that we wouldn’t fire her.”
Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said in an opinion (PDF posted by the New York Law Journal) that the comment about Joyce doing nothing was opinion, but allegations of her faking an illness were libelous per se.
