The Virginia Defamation Law Blog
When a defamation defendant can invoke statutory reporting immunity, anti-SLAPP immunity, and common law qualified privilege all at once, one might expect an appellate court to resolve the case on one of those defenses. In Wang v. Taylor, Record No. 2006-25-3 (Va. Ct. App. July 7, 2026), the Court of Appeals of Virginia did no such thing. In an unpublished memorandum opinion by Judge Bernhard, the court affirmed a demurrer to a nurse practitioner’s defamation claim on the narrow ground that the challenged statements lacked the requisite defamatory “sting.” Because sting was lacking, the court found it unnecessary to address any of the three immunity defenses the defendants had raised. The opinion is a clean illustration of the court’s gatekeeping role in defamation cases and of how a plaintiff cannot support a claim by isolating minor factual inaccuracies within a communication whose defamatory substance is conceded to be true.
The opinion presents the following facts. Zhan Wang, a licensed nurse practitioner, worked in a psychiatric practice at Carilion New River Valley Medical Center beginning in August 2019. Laura Taylor directed the relevant department. The two had a contentious relationship: Wang had refused to sign a noncompete agreement in September 2022, had reported various patient-care concerns to Taylor throughout 2022 and 2023, and had escalated concerns about allegedly unlawful practices to an authority at the Virginia Board of Nursing. Wang submitted a 90-day resignation notice by email on April 16, 2023. In August 2023, Taylor filed a report with the Virginia Department of Health Professions under Code § 54.1-2400.6, the statute governing mandatory reports concerning health professionals.
That report is the source of the defamation claim. In it, Taylor recounted that another nurse practitioner had raised concerns in April 2023 that Wang had examined a staff member off the record, prescribed a controlled substance to that staff member, and solicited patients for her private practice. The report stated that Wang had admitted, in meetings on April 13 and May 5, 2023, to prescribing medication to a staff member “via her private practice while on shift at Carilion” and to distributing business cards to gain patients for her private practice. The report further recounted that Carilion completed an investigation into Wang’s conduct on May 24, 2023, and sent her a disciplinary action in June 2023. Wang sued Taylor and Carilion for defamation per se, but she challenged only two narrow assertions: that Taylor met with her on April 13, 2023 (which Wang denied), and that she “submitted her resignation while under investigation” on May 5. (Wang claimed she was not under investigation when she resigned and that she resigned on April 16, not May 5.) Critically, Wang did not challenge the truth of the report’s account of her underlying conduct or of the investigation and discipline that followed. The circuit court sustained the defendants’ demurrer, and Wang appealed.
Reviewing the demurrer de novo, the Court of Appeals grounded its analysis in the familiar framework of Schaecher v. Bouffault, 290 Va. 83 (2015), and Handberg v. Goldberg, 297 Va. 660 (2019). A defamation plaintiff must allege publication of an actionable statement made with the requisite intent, and to be actionable a statement must be factual rather than opinion, defamatory, and false. Whether a statement is factual and whether it carries defamatory meaning are questions of law that courts decide in a “gatekeeping function,” while falsity is ordinarily a jury question under Hyland v. Raytheon Technical Services Co., 277 Va. 40 (2009). The defamatory element turns on whether the statement carries the requisite “sting,” i.e., whether it tends to injure reputation in the common estimation of the community or to render the plaintiff odious, infamous, or ridiculous. 
Because Wang pleaded defamation per se, she had to show that the statements prejudiced her in her profession or imputed to her an unfitness to perform its duties.
Wang’s theory was that falsely claiming she resigned while under investigation implied she had conceded culpability. But Wang did not dispute that she admitted the underlying conduct, that an investigation occurred, or that Carilion issued discipline. Against that unchallenged backdrop, the court concluded, the timing of her resignation “carries diminished significance.” Even accepting as true that Wang was not under investigation when she resigned, the isolated timing discrepancies could not injure her reputation in a way that the surrounding, conceded accusations did not already accomplish. The report as a whole was undeniably damaging to Wang’s professional reputation, but the specific statements she chose to challenge added no independent sting when measured against the greater weight of the allegations she left unchallenged. The statements therefore neither prejudiced Wang in her profession nor imputed unfitness to her, and the demurrer was properly sustained.
Note that although the defendants had asserted statutory immunity under Code § 54.1-2400.6(C), anti-SLAPP immunity under Code § 8.01-223.2(A)(i), and common law qualified privilege, the court reached none of those issues, invoking its “obligation to decide cases on the best and narrowest grounds available.” Because the claim failed at the actionability stage, there was no need to consider the privilege questions surrounding mandatory health-professional reporting.