Press: Wrestling with Defamation and Truth

In a 64-page charge that took two hours to read, Federal Judge Abraham Sofaer outlined the complex issues that the four women and two men on the jury had to evaluate. In reaching a verdict on former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon's $50 million libel suit against Time Inc., he explained, they faced three sets of questions about a single paragraph in TIME's Feb. 21, 1983, cover story about an official Israeli report on the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut. First, could the disputed passage, which reported on discussions Sharon had with Lebanese Christian Phalangist leaders prior to the massacre, be interpreted as having a meaning that defamed Sharon? If so, was the substance of the paragraph false? And if the answers to both these questions were yes, did TIME publish the paragraph "with a high degree of awareness" of its probable falsity? For Sharon to win his suit, the jury would have to answer yes to all three questions and then, after an additional round of testimony, find that his reputation had been damaged by the story.

In an unusual move, Sofaer asked the jury to report publicly their answers at each stage. After 14 hours of deliberations, the jury announced on Wednesday that it had found for Sharon on the first question. The paragraph, said the jury, implied that Sharon "consciously intended" to permit the Phalangists to take revenge by deliberately killing noncombatants in the camps. It took the jury an additional 20 hours of deliberation, which continued through Friday afternoon, to find that the disputed paragraph was in fact false. At week's end the jurors were still debating the question of malice.

$ TIME's cover story dealt with the report of a commission headed by Israel's Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan. The killings, which began two days after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, were carried out by Phalangist militiamen. The Kahan commission concluded that Sharon had ordered the militiamen into the camps and thus bore "indirect responsibility" for what happened; Sharon resigned his Defense post two days after the findings were released.

The paragraph at issue in Sharon's lawsuit comes halfway through the eight- page story; it described a condolence call Sharon paid to the Gemayel family the day after Bashir's death and said that information about the visit was contained in a classified Appendix B to the report. The passage went on to say: "Sharon reportedly told the Gemayels that the Israeli army would be moving into West Beirut and that he expected the Christian forces to go into the Palestinian refugee camps. Sharon also reportedly discussed with the Gemayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge for the assassination of Bashir, but the details of the conversation are not known."