"The family of writer Gore Vidal has hinted he had sex with underage men in claims that have surfaced as they contest his $37 million will."

What's the connection between the validity of a man's will and evidence of criminal sexual behavior? Gore Vidal left all his money to Harvard University and the family is irked. Now — after it's too late to punish the man for any crimes he may have committed — they're leaking this material?

I would infer that he did not do the things the disappointed, would-be heirs are talking about. Wouldn't he have been more likely to leave them money if he'd had a motivation to shut them up? He left them pissed and litigious. That speaks of a clean conscience!

I'm noticing this story this morning because of the way it's trumpeted in The Daily News, but the source is this far more sedate article from 3 days ago in the NYT. The NYT begins with the news that Vidal kept a fire burning even on hot days, because he had a titanium knee and had experienced hypothermia in the Army in WWII. The second paragraph details the decor of his living room where he died. We learn about the chair where he, in his elderly weakness, peed.

A pissed and litigious disappointed would-be heir is described as "not angry... but... bruised and resigned." Vidal's gift to Harvard is portrayed as the product of dementia. I see that Vidal did not attend Harvard. He went into the Army instead and later quipped: "What was the point of going into another institution when I had already written my first novel?"

Eventually, you arrive at the material the Daily News cherry-picked, about a nephew Burr Steers and his mother, Vidal's half-sister Nina Straight. Straight claims to have paid a million unreimbursed dollars into Vidal's lawsuit against William F. Buckley. Buckley had called Vidal "a queer," but why sue when, in fact, one is homosexual? Truth is a defense to defamation, even if the truth is stated nastily. Here's the buried story:

Mr. Steers said: “I know Buckley had a file on him that Gore feared. It would make sense if that material was about him having underage sex. Gore spent a lot of time in Bangkok, after all. Gore also had a very weird take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests. He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals.”

Mr. Steers said: “I know Buckley had a file on him that Gore feared. It would make sense if that material was about him having underage sex. Gore spent a lot of time in Bangkok, after all. Gore also had a very weird take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests. He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals.”

After Mr. Buckley died, his son, Christopher (who declined a request for interview) wrote of throwing, with “a sigh of relief,” a filing cabinet marked “Vidal Legal” into a Dumpster. Other friends of Mr. Vidal told me they doubted he had sex with underage men.

There's "a line between rhetorical hyperbole and defamation."

Said the court that let the climate scientist Michael Mann — he of the "hockey stick" — to continue with his lawsuit against the National Review. 

The court...  pointed to terminology such as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the [tree]-ring circus” and “cover-up” as “more than rhetorical hyperbole.”

The linked article miscorrects the joke "tree-ring circus" to "three-ring circus." Here's the blog post  that drove Mann to file a lawsuit — Mark Steyn calling attention to some football-and-hockey bad-taste humor.

"Corey Feldman threw himself a $250-per-guy birthday party with lingerie girls..."

"... and some jerk made it look kinda sad."

The problem began with the publication of VICE editor Jamie Lee Curtis Taete’s “I Went To Corey Feldman’s Birthday Party,” a firsthand account of a soiree recently Feldman threw himself in “The Feldmansion”....

Unfortunately, despite Taete’s introductory note explaining he was only allowed to attend on condition of allowing Feldman final edit of the piece—and that the story thus represented “text approved by Corey Feldman”—something about the way Taete captured his Corey’s Angels party didn’t sit well with Feldman....

“It’s called defamation of character and slander n I’m pretty sure those things r still illegal n this country,” Feldman tweeted....

Feldman approved the text, yet he's crying defamation... apparently because of the photographs. Well, go over and look at the photographs. As the headline says: some jerk made it look kinda sad.

"In the case of the male vegetarian, what may look like vegetarian or sexual orientation discrimination is really sex discrimination in the form of gender stereotyping..."

Says the abstract for a law review article titled "Of Meat and Manhood," which has led to a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit against the author:

New Jersey banker Robert Catalanello on December 28 sued Zachary Kramer, an associate dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law....

The article cites former employee Ryan Pacifico's 2009 complaint against Catalanello, including a charge that he made numerous derogatory comments equating Pacifico's vegetarianism with homosexuality. "You don't even eat steak dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?" he said, according to Pacifico's complaint....

"Catalanello harassed Pacifico not because Pacifico is vegetarian, but because Pacifico was not sufficiently masculine," reads one passage that Catalanello cited. "The key here is that vegetarianism acts as a proxy for effeminacy."

Defamation? Presumably, Catalanello disputes Pacifico's allegations and doesn't like the way Kramer, in at least one part of his article, presents the allegations without saying something like "according to Pacifico's compliant."

Here's the "Meat and Manhood" article. More from the abstract:

[Current doctrine says] that an employee cannot raise an actionable theory of sex discrimination to “bootstrap” protection for an unprotected trait.... By focusing on the male vegetarian case study – which involves allegations of vegetarian, sexual orientation, and gender-stereotyping discrimination – the Article argues that sex discrimination often manifests as other forms of bias.

That is, the law doesn't give special protection to you because you're a vegetarian, but it does let you sue for sex discrimination. So the litigant tries to present anti-vegetarian animus as a matter of gender. That's an interesting problem of employment discrimination law, but think about why the courts don't approve of this "bootstrapping."

(Via Taxprof.)

Tracking down Tawana Brawley in pursuit of a $429,000 in damages (and interest) for defamation that occurred in 1987.

"In all these years, she’s never told the truth about this hoax or paid me a cent," said Steven Pagones, the former Dutchess County prosecutor who was called a "gang-raping, kidnapping racist."

The case was catapulted onto the national stage by attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, and the then-little-known Rev. Al Sharpton, who claimed she was raped 33 times.

Celebrities weighed in, with Bill Cosby posting a $25,000 reward for information on the case, Don King promised $100,000 for Brawley’s education and boxer Mike Tyson gave her a $30,000 watch to ease her pain.

Brawley has just been located, working as a nurse, under an alias, in Virginia.

"British paper sues Lance Armstrong for $1.5m over lost libel action."

"Sunday Times paid now-disgraced cyclist $485,000 in 2006 over claims that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs."

That reminds me of this news item from The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959, reprinted in Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" (p. 106):

A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”

"We have of course gotten used to mommy bloggers embarrassing their children..."

"... saying which child they like best or how much they drink while stuck at home doing art projects."

Louis C.K. regularly embarrasses his kids and surely one day they will get their revenge. These are humiliations that might require a kid to get therapy later, but they are not on the same order as what [Liza] Long did. They are unlikely, for example, to prevent the kids from getting a job. So far the children’s rights movement has focused on protecting children from neglect and abuse, but maybe it’s time to add a subcategory protecting them from libel, by their own parents.

That's Hanna Rosin, writing about the "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" blogger, whom we talked about here.

"George Zimmerman has filed his defamation lawsuit against NBC and three reporters for their false editing..."

"... of his non-emergency call to police to report Trayvon Martin..."

The 24-page complaint alleges “NBC News saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create the myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain.”

ADDED: More detail here.