Press: Resting Their Cases

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Testimony ends in Ariel Sharon's libel suit against Time Inc.

After six weeks and 13 witnesses, lawyers for Israel's former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon last week rested their $50 million libel case against Time Inc. in a Manhattan federal courtroom. Paul Saunders, a lawyer for the firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which is defending Time Inc., then stepped to the podium. Calling no defense witnesses, he announced, "Your Honor, we rest." Both sides will offer closing arguments when court reconvenes Jan. 2.

"When you have the opportunity to quit while you are ahead in litigation, you take it," explained Saunders. Milton Gould, Sharon's chief attorney, said he was "astonished," and retorted: "You quit when you don't know what to do." But in presenting their case, Sharon's lawyers, from the firm of Shea & Gould, had called eight Time Inc. employees as "hostile witnesses," a tactic that allowed them the first opportunity to examine the journalists. Time Inc.'s attorneys questioned those witnesses fully during the plaintiffs presentation. Thus, the Cravath lawyers believed that the best witnesses TIME could have presented had already been heard and that the jury had all the information needed to judge the case.

Sharon contends that TIME libeled him in its Feb. 21, 1983, cover story about an official Israeli report on the 1982 massacre of some 700 Arabs, mainly Palestinians, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut. The murders, which began two days after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, were carried out by Christian Phalangist militiamen. The report of a commission headed by Israel's Supreme Court President, Yitzhak Kahan, found that Sharon had "disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance." The commission concluded that Sharon had ordered the militiamen into the camps and bore "indirect responsibility" for what had happened; Sharon resigned his defense post after the findings were released.

In a paragraph halfway through its eight-page story, TIME said that a classified Appendix B to the report contained details of a sympathy call Sharon had made on the Gemayel family on Sept. 15, 1982, the day after Bashir's death. According to the magazine, the Defense Minister "reportedly discussed with the Gemayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge." Sharon acknowledges that he met with the Gemayels but denies that the subject of revenge came up. He contends, moreover, that TIME'S account implies that he encouraged or instigated the massacre. Time Inc. maintains that the contested paragraph in no way accuses Sharon of fomenting the tragedy.