MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Legal Newsline) - A TV show-maker that insisted its ghost-hunting series wasn't serious journalism will get a new trial after a first one returned a $3 million verdict against it.
The widow of Jules Pierre Gillette sued after Regional Prime Television's Ghostly Encounters made wild accusations against supposed ghosts in a school building that the couple had lived in together in Jacksonville.
Tommy Dwayne Hubbard, who owns Regional Prime, testified it contains "silly things" and that the company stopped trying to do serious news because it was not financially sustainable.
A 2019 episode of Ghostly Encounters featured Jessica King, a supposed psychic medium Hubbard knows known as "Clairvoyant Jess," touring the school building and interpreting ghost activity there. Accompanying her was the building owner, Michael West.
One ghost was a man named with a handlebar mustache, and West claimed that was "Pierre."
Among King's comments on Pierre was that she heard he had a drinking problem, he was mentally unstable and that West had found letters from his wife to another man complaining he was physically abusive.
It was insinuated that since Pierre fixed and tuned pianos, he could play the role of the pied piper to abuse children.
A defamation claim and others were filed against Regional Prime, with plaintiffs counsel stating the show had portrayed the real-life Jules Pierre Gillette as "a paranormal pedo, where psychic Jess says he looks like an a--hole."
Gillette's widow said he had been a well-liked artist without a drinking problem who made therapy puppets for children and was never abusive toward her or their young child.
A jury returned a $3 million verdict, half on the Estate of Gillette's right-of-privacy claim and the other half for widow Jennifer South's claims.
However, the state Supreme Court reversed the $1.5 million for Gillette's claim and ordered a new trial for South's invasion-of-privacy and tort-of-outrage claims.
The station's owner Hubbard had not promoted the show with Gillette's name or photograph, the court ruled March 8.
"Hubbard also testified that he did not solicit any of the advertisers by using Gillette's name, that he did not make any financial profit from Gillette's middle name and photograph being used in the episode, and that he did not receive any monetary benefit from the episode," Justice Kelli Wise wrote.
"Based on the foregoing, the estate did not present substantial evidence demonstrating that the the use of Gillette's indicia of identity in the episode was 'for the purposes of trade.'"