Last week, the Law Blog posted an item on James Colliton, the ex-Cravath, Swaine & Moore tax attorney indicted earlier this month on charges that he paid for sex with two underage sisters. According to the New York Post, at a court hearing his attorney Howard Greenberg reportedly called the two young alleged rape victims “perjurers” and one of them a “skank”:
"My client made $500,000 a year. He had the wherewithal to pay for any piece of tuchus on the planet. And he paid that skank?"
A Law Blog reader named Dan Daoust terms this the, “I-can-get-any-tuchus-I-want defense.”
And what might the law have to say about the use of the word "skank"? Find out after the jump . . . .
And Law Blog reader Jeff Riffer of Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaroon in Los Angeles writes in that , at least in certain California jurisdictions, “skank” is not a defamatory phrase. He pointed us to Seelig v. Infinity Broadcasting Corp., 97 Cal.App.4th 798, 811 (2002) in which the Court held:The phrase big skank is not actionable because it is too vague to be capable of being proven true or false …. The word skank is a derogatory slang term of recent vintage that has no generally recognized meaning. Like ” ‘creepazoid attorney,’ ” it is a “subjective expression[] of disapproval, devoid of any factual content.” (Ferlauto v. Hamsher, supra, 74 Cal.App.4th at p. 1404; Copp v. Paxton (1996) 45 Cal.App.4th 829, 838 [52 Cal.Rptr.2d 831].) Indeed, plaintiff provided no accepted dictionary definition for the term skank to the trial court and, instead, only proffered a declaration from her ex-husband stating his understanding of the term skank as referring to “a woman of loose morals.” Plaintiff has cited no reported decision in California or elsewhere that has held the term skank constitutes actionable defamation, nor has our own research revealed any such decision.