Waite v. San Fernando Publ'g Co.

RICHARDS, J.,

pro

tem.

This is an appeal from a judgment in plaintiff’s favor in an action for libel, alleged to have consisted in the publication in a certain newspaper owned and controlled by the defendants of a certain article defamatory of the plaintiff’s character. The jury returned a general verdict of three thousand dollars’ damages against the defendants, and in response to special interrogatories found compensatory damages in the sum of two thousand dollars and exemplary damages in the sum of one thousand dollars. From the judgment entered upon such verdict the defendants prosecute this appeal.

The appellants’ first contention is that the complaint does not state facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action. This claim is predicated upon that portion of the complaint in which the plaintiff avers that he “was at all the times herein mentioned and now is a citizen of the state of California of good name and reputation,” and that “he has had and now has a wide circle of business, financial, social, and political friends, and was at all the times herein mentioned and now is engaged in conducting his private business affairs and in building up his personal reputation and business standing in the community in which he lives. ’ ’ The appellants urge that these averments of,the plaintiff’s complaint show that he was in no way damaged by the publication complained of, and hence had no cause of action. But the complaint goes much further in its averments as to the plaintiff’s injury than the foregoing excerpts would show. It sets forth in terms a publication which, both directly and inferentially, charges that the plaintiff deliberately took advantage of and overreached a widow recently bereaved and in ill health in a business transaction involving the sale of a crop of olives; and then proceeds to state that such a person is unworthy to be elected to an office of public"honor and trust, to which he aspires. The article was clearly and unmistakably libelous

per se.

The complaint proceeds to allege “that the publication of said article has caused, and does now cause, plaintiff great humilia

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tion, pain, and suffering; has injured and is injuring plaintiff’s reputation in the community where he lives and throughout the territory covered by the circulation of said newspaper, and has injured, and is injuring, plaintiff personally, financially, politically, and socially throughout said territory, and tended to, and tends to, destroy plaintiff’s personal, financial, political, and social standing throughout said territory.” It requires no argument to show that the complaint, read as a whole, constitutes a cause of action.