GRETNA, La. (Legal Newsline) - A journalism professor who lost a prestigious job at Arizona State University after being accused of racism by former students on Twitter and in a school newspaper lost her case after a Louisiana appeals court ruled the comments were protected under the state’s anti-SLAPP statute.
Saying comments in a series of articles and by school officials were about matters of public concern and didn’t contain any significant false statements, Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal reversed a trial judge’s refusal to dismiss the case and ordered the professor to pay fees and costs.
Among other things, the plaintiff accused Loyola’s then-President Tania Tetlow of slandering her by citing her advice to journalism students about the importance of appearance and saying it was “rooted in broader bias based on race, nationality, gender and sexuality.”
Sonya Duhé, a former journalist and news anchor, was a tenured professor at Loyola University in 2020 when she was offered the position of dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State and chief executive of Arizona Public Broadcasting.
She offered her resignation from Loyola on May 5, 2020. On June 2, she posted on Twitter an image of intertwined black and white hands with the statement: “For the family of George Floyd, the good police officers who keep us safe, my students, faculty and staff. Praying for peace on this #BlackOutTuesday.”
Whitney Woods, a student who had previously filed a complaint against Dr. Duhé through the Loyola student grievance reporting system, responded: “You are one of, if not, THE most racist human that I have ever encountered in a professional setting.”
The tweet exchange was reported by various news organizations including the Arizona Republic and ASU State Press. On June 5, the Loyola student newspaper the Maroon published the first in a series of articles, editorials and letters to the editor with allegations against her by former students. Some of the articles featured comments by Michael Giusti, a faculty member.
One June 7, Arizona State rescinded the Duhe’s job offer. A little less than a year later, Duhe sued Loyola, its president Tania Tetlow and Giusti for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The defendants moved to dismiss, citing their right to freedom of speech under Louisiana Civil Code Article 971, an anti-SLAPP law (for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). The trial judge denied the motion in May 2022 and Loyola appealed.
The appeals court reversed, saying the reporting involved a matter of significant public interest and Duhe couldn’t prove any of the statements were false. The only untrue statement was that a woman in the class of 2015 was the first African American editor of the Maroon when in fact there had been one in the 1970s.
Duhe’ accused the school and officials of “defamation by omission,” by printing statements suggesting she supported a system that excluded people of color while disregarding evidence to the contrary. The appeals court rejected her claims, however, saying the contrary evidence included private e-mails writers at the school newspaper were highly unlikely to have seen.
The professor also accused the school newspaper of slander per se for stating the next director of the communications department “should be a person of color” because that “would help many students of color feel represented, when in the past they have been made to feel unwelcome.”
Slander per se only includes allegations of criminal wrongdoing, the appeals court ruled. “To be accused of making someone feel unwelcome is not the equivalent of accusing them of perpetrating a crime,” the court said.
The professor accused Tetlow of slandering her in a news release after ASU rescinded her job offer, describing the “anger and pain that centered on Dr. Duhé’s comments upon the expectations about appearance in broadcast journalism - dress and makeup, ideas of physical attractiveness, weight, and particularly, hair.”
“These preferences by broadcasters are rooted in broader bias based on race, nationality, gender and sexuality. women of color who are broadcast journalists feel the full brunt of restrictive rules of gender about appearance and weight in addition to the seditious and disparate impact of race (like objections to natural hair),” Tetlow said in the statement.
“Dr. Duhéhas not claimed either of these statements are false, but argues instead that any comments she made in the classroom regarding appearance were stated in order to make students aware of the bias that exists in the industry and prepare them for future employment,” the appeals court said.