Sharon Loses Libel Suit as Jury Finds No Malice : But Verdict for Time Carries Unusual Warning, Citing Negligence, Lack of Verification of Facts

Former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon lost his two-year $50-million libel suit against Time magazine Thursday when a jury found insufficient evidence to prove Time acted with malice in publishing an inaccurate 1983 cover story about Sharon’s role in the massacre of Palestinians in West Beirut.

In the first two parts of its verdict last week, the federal court panel of four women and two men ruled that a paragraph in the story was both defamatory and erroneous, prompting Sharon to claim victory in his political objective for bringing the suit--proving Time wrong.

Legally, however, the case ended in Time’s favor on the 11th day of deliberations when jury foreman R. Peter Zug read aloud the jury’s finding that Sharon had failed to prove that anyone at Time “responsible for either reporting, writing, editing or publishing” the story knew that it “was false or had serious doubts as to its truth.”

Sharon Shows No Emotion

Sharon, dressed as ever in a gray pinstripe suit, betrayed no emotion when the verdict was read but quickly left with his wife, Lili, and security agents for his private chamber behind courtroom 110 of the U.S. District Courthouse here, the same courtroom where the trials of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and Maurice H. Stans, former secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration, were held.

Although the jury found in Time’s favor, it made an extraordinary request to couple its verdict with an admonition to the magazine:

“We find that certain Time employees, particularly correspondent David Halevy (who was chiefly responsible for the one paragraph disputed in the suit), acted negligently and carelessly in reporting and verifying the information which ultimately found its way into the published paragraph of interest in this case.”

If Sharon were not a public figure, a finding of negligence would have been enough to prove libel because the jury found the paragraph actually had damaged Sharon’s reputation.

After the verdict, Time issued a statement saying: “This libel suit is over, and Time has won it.”

But outside the courtroom Time Managing Editor Ray Cave conceded to reporters that the case has done Time damage. “There is no doubt in my mind that in the very short term” the case “will raise questions in the public’s mind about our practices and about how careful we are.” Those questions will fade, Cave predicted, when readers recall Time’s longstanding record. “In the long term, I think the adverse effects will be negligible.”

Sharon, however, insisted that he was satisfied with the result despite his legal defeat.

“We came to this country to prove that Time lied, and we managed to prove that Time lied and we managed to prove that there was a clear defamation,” he said.

Sharon attorney Milton Gould also discounted the legal defeat. “‘We got everything we came for, and then we got caught up on the coils of American libel law (on the question of malice). We didn’t come for money. We came for truth and we got it,” he said.

No Appeal Planned

Gould and Sharon said they would not appeal the verdict.

The case centered on one paragraph in the Feb. 21, 1983, Time cover story about the Kahan Commission, an Israeli government panel investigating who was responsible for the Lebanese Christian militia’s massacre of more than 700 Palestinian civilians in West Beirut’s Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in September, 1982. The attack came a day after the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel. The paragraph read:

“One section of the report known as Appendix B was not published at all, mainly for security reasons. That section contains the names of several intelligence agents referred to elsewhere in the report. Time has learned that it also contains further details about Sharon’s visit to the Gemayel family on the day after Bashir Gemayel’s assassination. Sharon reportedly told the Gemayels that the Israeli army would be moving into West Beirut and that he expected the Christian forces to go into the Palestinian refugee camps. Sharon also reportedly discussed with the Gemayels the need for the Phalangists to take revenge for the assassination of Bashir, but the details of the conversation are not known.”

Five days after the story was published, Sharon sued Time for libel, claiming that the paragraph in effect accused him of instigating or at least knowingly permitting the massacre.

Time said the paragraph did not have that meaning and that it never believed or wrote that Sharon instigated the massacre.

Instead, Time argued that the paragraph really went no further than the Kahan Commission, which found that Sharon bore “indirect responsibility” for the massacre because he should have at least “felt apprehension” it could occur.

Within days of the commission findings, the Israeli Cabinet forced Sharon’s resignation as defense minister.

In its statement Thursday, Time reiterated the contention that Sharon had filed his suit not so much against Time as against the findings of the Kahan Commission, which Sharon at the time denounced for unjustly giving him “the mark of Cain.”

Sharon “could not sue Israel’s Kahan Commission,” the Time statement said. “So he sued Time. Time feels strongly that the case should never have reached an American courtroom. It was brought by a foreign politician attempting to recoup his political fortunes.”

While Sharon has denied this charge, he did politicize the case as the trial’s first witness by calling Time’s story a “blood libel” against Israel and all Jews. That testimony raised criticism in Israel that Sharon had no authority to represent the Jewish state with the lawsuit.

The case came down to a test of Time’s integrity vs. Sharon’s, in large part because Time’s sources for its disputed paragraph were confidential and the Israeli government prohibited anyone else present at the meetings in question from testifying.

So Sharon’s legal strategy consisted largely of grilling Time’s staff on the stand, endeavoring to depict its news-gathering methods as reckless and untrustworthy.

Halevy, for instance, admitted under oath that actually he had only “inferred” that Appendix B contained details of Sharon’s meetings with Lebanese leaders after hearing a description of what sort of material Appendix B contained.

That disclosure and others apparently played a part in inspiring the jury’s extraordinary statement criticizing Halevy.

The jury also may have been influenced by the dramatic 11th hour introduction of testimony, taken in Israel, by Yitzhak Kahan, chairman of the Kahan Commission, that the Appendix B did not contain the information Time alleged. Time promptly conceded it was wrong on that point and printed a retraction.

One of the six jurors, Lydia Burdick, told Cable News Network, “We felt that people at Time actually believed the information that Halevy had gotten from his source . . . . There wasn’t any question of the accuracy, however. In terms of gathering the information and checking it out, a much better job could have been done . . . . People should have been asking some questions.”

During the trial, Time stunned its opponents by ending its own case immediately, declining to call a single witness. Time argued that it had presented its case by cross-examining Sharon’s witnesses.

More Such Suits Seen

Legal experts said that despite the verdict in Time’s favor, there was little reason to think future libel suits would be deterred. They noted that Sharon was able to present his side of the dispute in a worldwide forum and come away with initial jury findings that the article was defamatory and false.

Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe pointed out that the magazine had been forced to spend millions in legal fees and other costs defending itself. “Far from discouraging suits, this case will encourage them,” Tribe said. “It shows that even when you can’t prove recklessness, you can still achieve a great deal and impose severe penalties just by bringing suit.”

Similarly, UC Berkeley law professor Stephen R. Barnett observed: “Sharon can claim he was vindicated by the first two parts of the verdict, even though he ‘lost’ the case. That would appear to serve at least as much to encourage as to discourage future libel suits.”

Following the verdict, Cave told reporters: “David Halevy will continue as a reporter for Time magazine, and I hope he continues to discover major stories as he has in the past.”

The jury, which Judge Sofaer praised for reaffirming his faith in the American jury system, deliberated for 78 hours over 11 days, 42 hours on the question of malice alone.

Headed by Zug, a computer programmer for IBM, the jury seemed unusually methodical, calling for every exhibit on each question it examined.