Brace Kern, an attorney, on behalf of his clients,
Saburi Boyer and Danielle Kort, filed a lawsuit alleging that Bryan Punturo
engaged in extortion to coerce Boyer to pay him money in exchange for Punturo’s
promise not to compete with Boyer’s parasailing business. Kern also reported the allegations to the
Attorney General (AG), who filed a charge of felony extortion against
Punturo. Kern, Boyer, and Kort were
interviewed by the media about their lawsuit and the AG’s extortion charge, and
they made statements about the matter. After
the civil and criminal cases were dismissed, Punturo and other plaintiffs sued Kern,
Boyer, and Kort for defamation. The
trial court, relying on Bedford v Witte,
318 Mich App 60 (2016), concluded that the statements were not privileged under
the fair reporting privilege, MCL 600.2911(3), and that questions of fact
remained as to other elements of the defamation claim. Consequently, the trial court denied the
parties’ motions for summary disposition. The Court of Appeals affirmed in an
unpublished opinion. The Supreme Court
has ordered oral argument on the application to address: (1) whether, as a threshold matter,
the fair reporting privilege, MCL 600.2911(3) — which can only be invoked “in a
libel action” — applies in a case in which the appellants are not the media
companies that published the allegedly defamatory statements, but are instead
the persons who furnished the oral statements to the media; (2) whether the
Court of Appeals erred in holding that the appellants’ allegedly defamatory
statements to the media regarding the pending litigation were not protected
under the fair reporting privilege; (3) whether Bedford v Witte, 318 Mich App 60 (2016), was wrongly
decided; and (4) whether the standards for application of the statutory fair
reporting privilege are different for statements made by an attorney or by a
layperson-litigant.