Trial Starts in Van Deerlin Suit Against Columnist

A libel suit against syndicated columnist Jack Anderson went to trial Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Diego with arguments centering on a crucial question: Did Anderson faithfully report the news or did he help create it for a 1983 column that implicated former U.S. Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin (D-San Diego) as a customer of a Capitol Hill drug ring?

Van Deerlin filed suit two years ago alleging that Anderson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column libeled him by claiming that he was suspected of buying drugs. The suit charged that the column, and another published nine months earlier, were knowingly and maliciously false.

Van Deerlin, 71, had already retired in San Diego when the articles were published in more than 700 newspapers across the nation. He served the 41st Congressional District for 18 years before being upset by Duncan Hunter in 1980.

The former congressman’s lawyer, Michael Aguirre, charged Thursday that Anderson “knew the two documents (on which the stories were based) were not accurate since he took a hand in manufacturing them.”

Aguirre claimed that two members of Anderson’s reporting team gave information about a drug ring to a police detective, who then passed it on to Rep. Robert Dornan (R-Garden Grove). The detective’s letter and Dornan’s report to another congressman on the drug ring were then used as the basis of the Anderson stories, Aguirre said.

The handwritten memo from Detective Michael Hubbard, introduced as evidence, said that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Van Deerlin were among nine congressmen who had been implicated as possible drug users by “more than one source.”

Hubbard admitted that the memo was “raw, unsubstantiated and unprovable” in a deposition he made for an unrelated case. But when Aguirre tried to introduce the deposition as evidence, he was repeatedly challenged by Anderson’s lawyer, David Branson.

Judge Leland C. Nielsen eventually said the memo could be read but withheld judgment about whether it will be admitted as evidence.

When Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, took the stand as the first witness, he said his columns were based on the police and congressional documents. “I’m a reporter, and all I did was report the facts,” Anderson said.

He described how two of his reporters worked with Dornan and Hubbard to arrange a “sting” operation to catch drug pushers and users in the Capitol. But, during a break, he denied that reports were planted by his staff to create a basis for the columns.

The column naming Van Deerlin and eight other congressmen said they had been implicated by information from “at least three informants.”

The informants’ names came from a list of 37 informants who had given information to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anderson said, although he said he did not know which three had implicated Van Deerlin.

Anderson said he was satisfied with the truth of his stories, although the names of specific informants and the congressmen they implicated were never learned.

“We want the first and last names of those informants,” Van Deerlin said to reporters as he left for lunch. “We want the names, and we want to put those people on the stand.”

Van Deerlin said he was not relieved that the column said he was only “accused” of taking drugs.

“That really isn’t very comforting to me,” he said, “as someone who has sought to carry his good name throughout 18 years in public life. . . . I’ve never even seen cocaine. I don’t know what it looks like.”

He said Anderson’s “gross carelessness” showed malice.

Aguirre also sought to point out discrepancies between Anderson’s stories and the reports on which they were based. The article naming Van Deerlin said investigators had “incriminating evidence of involvement,” but the story was based on a police memo that said only that “intelligence” had been gathered.

“In my mind the terms were interchangeable,” Anderson told the court. “I was trying to use language that was easier for the reader to understand.

“If we are going to be challenged on all the language that we use then we are going to have to become lawyers before we can become newspapermen.”

David Branson, Anderson’s lawyer, said the U.S. Supreme Court has granted reporters literary license so that word usage cannot be used to prove that the writer acted with malice.

Anderson said he has been sued for libel as many as 12 times in 38 years, but that the Van Deerlin case is only the third to go to court. He won the previous two.

Sources told the Times earlier this week that the renowned columnist and the former congressman had tried and failed to reach an out-of-court settlement. But Anderson said he had never settled out of court.

“Believe me,” he said outside the courtroom, “if we can’t run stories based on congressional documents, we are going to be in trouble. I don’t know what we’ll write about.”