The New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected the defamation and invasion-of-privacy claims of a father of two children in the Hanover School District who alleged that a newspaper falsely called him a white supremacist because he supported a measure to limit the teaching of critical race theory.
Daniel Richards objected to the teaching of critical race theory in the schools and supported a New Hampshire measure that limited such instruction. Robert Aziz wrote an op-ed titled, “White supremacists reveal content of their character” that was published by the New Hampshire Union-Leaderin June 2021.
A paragraph in the piece identified Richards by name, reading:
“Desperate to stay bonded to America’s original sins of slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples, Gingrich, Frank Edelblut, Dan Richards, Mike Moffett, Joseph Mendola, and others have disseminated, across multiple media platforms, white supremacist ideology to keep Americans from learning an unexpurgated American history from its 1619 origins alongside the dominant White 1776 narrative.”
Richards sued the Union-Leader and Aziz for defamation and false-light invasion of privacy. A New Hampshire trial court dismissed the claims, reasoning that the article contained mainly non-actionable opinion rather than any false statements of fact.
On appeal, the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed the trial court. On the defamation claim, the state high court reasoned that the article’s terms “racist” and “white supremacist” were not defamatory.
“Reading the op-ed as a whole, we agree with the trial court that the op-ed merely expressed the author’s political opinions and beliefs that he individually held about the plaintiff and others not based on any undisclosed defamatory facts,” the court wrote in its Sept. 4, 2024, decision in Richards v. Union Leader Corporation.
The court termed the paragraph containing Richards’ name to be “imaginative expression.” It characterized the language as “non-actionable opinion.”
With regard to the privacy claim, the high court refused to recognize false-light invasion of privacy as an actionable tort in the state, reasoning that it is too duplicative – or too similar – to a defamation action.
The state high court concluded: “Accordingly, we join those jurisdictions that, like Florida, have declined to recognize a common law false light invasion of privacy action.”
David L. Hudson Jr. teaches First Amendment law and constitutional law classes at Belmont University College of Law. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of more than 50 books, including The Constitution Explained: A Guide for Every American (Visible Ink Press, 2022) and The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech (Thomson Reuters, 2012).
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