The Charleston Gazette Mail
A federal judge in Wheeling on Thursday issued initial rulings that were favorable to Murray Energy and its outspoken CEO, Bob Murray, in defamation cases the coal operator brought against The New York Times and against HBO and its late-night personality, John Oliver.
In the Times case, U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey denied a motion by the newspaper’s lawyers to dismiss Murray’s case. And in the case against HBO and Oliver, Bailey granted a request by Murray that the matter be sent back to Marshall County Circuit Court.
Murray, West Virginia’s largest coal producer, sued the Times over an editorial and HBO over a segment on Oliver’s Sunday night show, alleging that comments by the Times and Oliver about Murray’s safety record and about the 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine disaster — in which six miners and three rescue workers were killed — were false and defamatory.
In a June segment on “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver criticized the Trump administration’s effort to revive the coal industry, and made fun of Murray, who blames a decline in mining on Obama administration regulatory efforts.
The Times, in an April editorial, called Murray a “serial violator of federal health and safety rules” and said the CEO had “earned infamy” when he insisted the collapse of the Crandall Canyon Mine, in Utah, was “due to an earthquake, not dodgy mining practices.”
Lawyers for Murray and his company said both reports were false, that the Times made no attempt to give a “full portrayal” of Murray’s record and that the HBO show ignored information Murray had provided that supported the company’s views.
In the HBO case, Bailey said the matter doesn’t belong in federal court because there is no “diversity jurisdiction,” a situation in which parties are residents of different states and federal courts can hear their disputes.
When they filed the case, lawyers for Murray included as plaintiffs Murray Energy, Bob Murray and five of Murray Energy’s affiliate companies. Bailey noted that the plaintiff corporations and HBO were all Delaware corporations and said statements Oliver made about Bob Murray were made in his professional capacity and, therefore, could reflect negatively on the operation of his businesses.
“Not only is Mr. Murray heavily interrelated with these corporations in a formal business sense, but a reasonable person who knows of Mr. Murray, especially in West Virginia or another coal state, would find it nearly impossible to separate Mr. Murray from his corporations and mines,” Bailey wrote in a 10-page order. “With such a strong interrelationship between Mr. Murray and the plaintiff corporations, defamatory statements made about Mr. Murray in his professional capacity may be easily seen as negatively implicating the operation of his corporations.”
Bailey said the same reasoning applies in the case against the Times, where the newspaper’s statements were about Bob Murray, and the only plaintiffs listed in the case were Murray Energy and the five affiliate companies.
“While it may be odd that Mr. Murray has chosen not to participate in this suit, his companies may still sue in his stead because they are effectively one and the same for the purpose of this suit,” Bailey wrote.
In a nine-page order declining to dismiss the case against the Times, Bailey noted that an initial motion to dismiss was “not the proper stage to judge the veracity” of the claims against the newspaper and that, at that point in the process, the complaint “must be viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs.”
For example, the judge said that “a reasonable reader” might view the statement that Murray is a “serial violator” of safety rules to be intended to say Murray “must be worse than other companies,” especially in the context of an article “meant to negatively portray Mr. Murray and President Trump.”
Gary Broadbent, a spokesman for Murray Energy, said the company was pleased with both rulings and would vigorously pursue both cases.
In a statement, the Times said, “We’re confident that our editorial was accurate and that we will prevail in this case.”
HBO did not respond to a request for comment on Bailey’s rulings.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at [email protected], 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.