NY Post settles defamation suit over 'Bag Men' headline in its Boston Marathon coverage
The New York Post has settled a defamation lawsuit brought by two young men featured on the newspaper’s cover, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, with the headline: “Bag Men,” the New York Daily News reports.
Salaheddin Barhoum, 16, and Yassine Zaimi, 24, had been photographed standing near the finish line on the day of the bombing. Their photos were circulated by amateur sleuths on the Internet. Hours prior to the newspaper’s publication, each had separately and voluntarily gone to local police stations to speak with authorities, according to court documents (PDF). Both were interviewed, told they were not suspects, and released.
When the Post hit the newsstands hours later, a photo of Barhoum and Zaimi took up the whole front cover. Under the “Bag Men” headline, the Post’s subhead read: “Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.” Inside, two additional photos of Barhoum and Zaimi were printed, one with their faces circled in red. Zaimi learned he’d been on the front page when he came to work and was told his manager had called the FBI; Barhoum discovered it when he returned home from a track meet and found a crowd of reporters interviewing his parents.
Both sides declined to reveal any details of the settlement.
But a judge’s decision (PDF) to deny a motion to dismiss last March likely motivated the newspaper to make the matter go away, reports Eric Wemple on his Washington Post blog.
U.S. District Judge Judith Fabricant wrote that “in the court’s view, a reasonable reader could construe the publication as expressly saying law enforcement personnel were seeking not only to identify the plaintiffs, but also to find them, and as implying that the plaintiffs were the bombers, or at least investigators so suspected.”
The judge also noted that the “Bag Men” headline stretched across the photo showing the plaintiffs carrying bags (backpack and shoulder bag visible in the picture) “could fairly have been understood to imply that their bags were the ones that transported the bombs.”
