Articles Tagged with school

Last year I wrote a post about how it can be defamatory for an employer to misrepresent the reasons for an employee’s termination. If an employer says that an employee was fired because of reasons X, Y, and Z, the employee may have a valid defamation claim even if statements X, Y, and Z are all completely true. If the reason for the employee’s termination had nothing to do with those pretextual reasons, then the employer’s statement, taken as a whole, is false and therefore potentially defamatory. A case came across my desk today involving a very similar issue: whether a university can be held liable for defamation when announcing that a student’s dismissal from a degree program was due to certain seemingly valid and legitimate concerns based on the student’s failure to pass a required test, when the student’s dismissal was actually due to something else entirely. Consistent with earlier rulings, the court found that on these alleged facts, the plaintiff had presented a viable defamation claim.

The case is John Doe v. Shenandoah University. The alleged facts of the case, according to the opinion, go something like this. The plaintiff was born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United States, where he is now a permanent resident. He enrolled in the Physician Assistant Studies Program (“PA Program”) at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. At some point after his enrollment, he developed Social Anxiety Disorder, a health condition characterized by extreme fear of social settings. He requested and received various accommodations due to this disorder, such as (a) time and a half for all quizzes and examinations and (b) testing in a quiet, distraction-free environment. One test he was required to pass as part of the PA Program was the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (“OSCE”), a “time-limited practical exam conducted at the end of certain semesters in the PA program” consisting of “a set of predefined stations related to patient care.”

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Truth is not always a defense to defamation claims in Virginia. Sometimes a statement that is literally true will nevertheless convey an implied message with defamatory meaning. Virginia thus recognizes claims for defamation by implication in addition to claims for libel and slander made expressly. The latest case to illustrate this principle is Cameron M. Jackson v. Liberty University, currently pending in the Western District of Virginia federal court.

The facts, according to the original complaint, are essentially as follows. Cameron Jackson is a former student and football player at Liberty University, a Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sarah Browning was on the university’s swim team. Jackson and Browning had been involved in a “casual sexual relationship” for several months. At an off-campus party in August 2015, Browning approached several members of the football team (including Jackson) and performed oral sex on them. Later that night, Jackson and Browning engaged in consensual intercourse in the living room of a friend’s apartment, where others could and did see them.

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