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<i> Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation's press</i>

David Letterman did not defame actress Martha Raye when he joked in a television monologue that she was a “condom wearer,” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Norman Epstein tentatively ruled Wednesday. Raye, a comedian and the longtime TV pitchwoman for a denture product, sued Letterman for $10 million, claiming Letterman’s remarks made in a March 5 broadcast of “Late Night With David Letterman” implied she was “sexually promiscuous and unchaste” and “personally uses condoms in some form of deviant, aberrant or socially unacceptable . . . behavior.”

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