Ex-Hostages Take Stand in Plotkin Libel Case Hearing

Three former Iranian hostages, recalling some painful details of their captivity, told a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last week of collaborating with fellow captive Jerry Plotkin on the 1979 televised Christmas message he read urging return of the deposed shah to Iran in exchange for their freedom.

They also said it was their decision that Plotkin, the only civilian hostage not connected with the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, be the one to read the message from the hostages.

As military personnel, “we didn’t want to make a flat propaganda statement,” said ex-Marine Paul Lewis, “but we did want the message to get out that we were alive and well.” The political content of the message, much of it included under pressure from their guards, did not seem important to them at the time, he said.

Lewis and two other ex-Marines who were security guards at the embassy when it was taken over by revolutionary students in November, 1979, were in Los Angeles to appear on behalf of Plotkin at a pretrial hearing in his $60-million libel suit against the Daily News.

Question of Status

At issue is whether Plotkin, a Sherman Oaks businessman and one of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iranian militants, was a public or a private figure at the time the disputed article was published after release of the hostages.

Questioning at the hearing, which began Jan. 15, has focused largely on Plotkin’s activities while a prisoner to get and hold public attention on the hostage crisis, including an audiotaped interview with a U.S. broadcaster and letters to his wife urging her to keep the issue alive.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Christian E. Markey will determine whether Plotkin had voluntarily thrust himself into a public controversy to become a public figure, in the legal sense for purposes of libel.

The front-page article, published by the San Fernando Valley-based Daily News on Jan. 21, 1981, the day after the hostages were freed, said Plotkin had been under investigation by Los Angeles police before he went to Iran. It also said he might be under federal scrutiny for his activities at the U.S. Embassy in Iran and implied that he was suspected of drug trafficking.

Deny Allegations

The Police Department and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency subsequently denied the article’s allegations.

If Plotkin, 52, is deemed to be a public figure in the legal definition, he will have to prove that the article was published with malice or reckless disregard for the truth. If deemed a private figure, he will have the lesser burden of proving negligence.

Plotkin has said that he was in Iran to recruit workers for a construction project there. He now works for a Los Angeles insurance adjustment firm.

Plotkin, on the witness stand Friday, was asked if he was aware after making the Christmas message that his name was “a household word all over America.”

Plotkin replied, “I don’t think so.”

Produces Letter

Attorney Morgan Chu, representing Arnie Friedman, one of the reporters who wrote the article, then produced a letter written to Plotkin by a friend the day after the message was telecast saying that he was now “a household word” and that his wife, Debbie, looked good on television. Chu also showed Plotkin a letter he had written to his wife from captivity a month later saying, “You were in the papers and TV and handling things well.”

The three ex-Marines called to Los Angeles on Plotkin’s behalf--Lewis, William Gallegos and Rocky Sickmann--told the court about the early days of their captivity when they and a fourth Marine were held in close confinement with Plotkin.

Gallegos told of attending daily propaganda sessions with Plotkin and being shown films of atrocities purportedly perpetrated under the shah. Lewis and Sickmann both testified to pressure brought to bear on them by their guards to include anti-shah propaganda in the Christmas message.

Lewis, who is now an Illinois stockbroker, said the Marines were “very concerned” that their captors were going to remove the civilian Plotkin to another location “and make him do what they wanted.” As trained military personnel, “we knew they couldn’t make us (say things they did not want to say),” he said, adding: “The guards very much wanted us to pass on their (propaganda) line.”

‘I Would Resist’

“I was not going to deliver any message other than who I was and that I was alive,” he said. “I would resist as long as possible. . . . I didn’t think Jerry ought to be expected to take the sort of abuse we were prepared to.”

To convey the fears hostages lived with, Sickmann said they underwent mock executions by their captors. On one such occasion, after being rounded up and ordered to strip nude, he heard firearms clicking and “thought they were going to blow our heads off, or maybe the Americans were coming to rescue us.”

Sickmann, who now works in marketing for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, said guards had shown them films of nude bodies shot in the head, purported to be victims of the shah’s regime.

As Plotkin “worked up his thoughts” about what to put in the Christmas message, the rough draft was passed around among his fellow prisoners and the Marines agreed to add their names at the end for Plotkin to read aloud, which he did.

‘To Get Out the Word’

“We agreed that this statement was the tool to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish,” which was to get out the word that they were alive, Lewis said.

Gallegos, responding Friday to questions of attorney Daniel Fogel, representing the Daily News, said he and Plotkin had had one conversation about drugs while they were hostages. He said Plotkin told him he had spent some time in jail for a drug offense “that happened when I was about 8.” Gallegos, now a criminal justice student in Colorado, said the drug in question was marijuana.

Evidence filed in the case shows that Plotkin was convicted in 1966 on a federal count of conspiracy to possess marijuana.

The hearing is expected to run one more week.