Glenn Beck's repeated - and false - accusations that a Saudi student helped fund the Boston marathon bombing may soon cost him some bucks and bring on a new crying jag.
A while back, I wrote about the libel suit against former Fox host Beck on Addicting Info:
In April, 2013, Beck seized on Abdulrahman Alharbi, a young man who was injured in the bombings and who was briefly a suspect. Alharbi was later exonerated as merely a witness. But Beck called Alharbi “a very, very, very bad man” and repeatedly suggested the U.S. government was covering up Alharbi’s involvement.
Beck has since tried to get Alharbi's lawsuit dismissed by calling him a public figure. If Alharbi were a public figure, the bar for a lawsuit would be much higher. As Right Wing Watch points out, "Beck's legal team was essentially arguing that Alharbi became a public figure as a result of Beck's attacks ... which they said means that Alharbi cannot now sue Beck for those very same attacks because he was a public figure."
Fortunately, U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris saw right through this effort. From Politico:
"Choosing to attend a sporting event as one of thousands of spectators is not the kind of conduct that a reasonable person would expect to result in publicity. Quite to the contrary, a spectator at an event like the Boston Marathon would reasonably expect to disappear into the throngs of others, never attracting notice by the press. Because he did not 'assume the risk of publicity,' Alharbi does not meet the definition of an involuntary public figure," the judge wrote.
Saris went on to note that Beck continued to level allegations at the Saudi student for several weeks after authorities made clear Alharbi was no longer under investigation.
"Even if a private person meets the definition of an involuntary public figure as a matter of bad luck during a public controversy, the status is of limited duration. As such, Alharbi lost that status when his name was cleared," the judge wrote in an opinion posted here.
Coincidentally, Beck recently announced he has some kind of rare neurological disease that makes him "look crazy." Not surprisingly, that claim has since been called into question by medical experts. But anybody else want to bet that Beck will use this as a legal defense as he tries to squirm away from personal responsibility for his own hate mongering?
Break out your hankies. I think Beck is going to need them.
(H/T Aria)
photo credit: DonkeyHotey via photopin cc
Don’t be shocked if The Actor tries to settle this lawsuit out of court. We hope Alharbi does not settle it out of court, and takes The Blaze as his own publishing company, or turn it into a nonprofit business venture.
NOTE TO BECK
You picked on the wrong person. Now you will have to pay up.
Or maybe that should be case*s*. Jewell filed libel suits against: his former employer, Piedmont College; NBC News (specifically a statement made on-air by Tom Brokaw); the New York Post; and Cox Enterprises (the parent company of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper). Only the suit against Cox was dismissed—and, despite Cox’s contention that the suit had no merit, it was really dismissed following Jewell’s death.