Business, Finance, & Economics: November 2009 Archives

A Hall County, Georgia, jury has decided that The Red Hat Club author libeled a former friend in a novel.  On Nov. 19, the jury found that Haywood Smith's bestselling 2003 novel damaged Vicki Stewart because it featured a character who closely resembled Stewart and portrayed her as a sexually promiscuous alcoholic. The jury rejected a claim of invasion of privacy.

The jury of eight men and four women awarded Stewart $100,000 in damages but denied her request for attorney fees. Because Stewart is not a public figure, her attorneys needed to prove only that Smith acted with negligence, not the higher standard of actual malice.

Dean Hugh Ruppersburg, libel expert witness for the defense, said "from the first sentence, the first paragraph of The Red Hat Club, it presented itself to me as a work of fiction."

 

For more, see www.firstamendmentcenter.org

Jury selection will begin in February in the trial of a Bound Brook, NJ, nightclub and its co-owners on charges of not paying state sales taxes.  Borough resident Rafael Rosario and his half-brother Rafael Amaro, of Edison, and their nightclub, El Cafe Imperial, were indicted in June 2007 on nine counts of not paying state sales taxes on products sold at the Talmage Avenue establishment.  Rosario and Amaro are charged with keeping about $100,000 in unpaid taxes for their own use, Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne J. Forrest said at the time of the indictment.  Somerset County Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Murphy said he had received this week a report from the defense's expert witnesses on the sales-tax issue.

Excerpted from mycentraljersey.com .