PAGES : This Art Didn’t Imitate Life

Like Susan Sutter, Monica Randall is a glamorous redhead, a preservationist and an accomplished painter of the mansions on Long Island’s pricey Gold Coast.

But Monica Randall is a real person. Susan Sutter exists only as the lead character in Nelson DeMille’s novel “Gold Coast.” The book spent three months on national bestseller lists.

In a $5-million libel suit against DeMille and Warner Books, Randall maintained that unlike Susan Sutter, she was not mentally unstable, an adulteress nor sexually involved with organized crime figures.

In dismissing the case in its entirety, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that the novel was “clearly fictional and is labeled as such.” Justice Herman Cahn added that “the plaintiff’s assertion that it is based on truth or that it borrows from reality does not change the novel’s character, nor does it somehow make parts of it nonfiction for the purposes of a libel action.”

Richard Kurnit, attorney for the defendants, called the decision “a significant victory” for the rights of authors and publishers: “It is important that authors and publishers be allowed to write and publish without fear that they will be sued by every ‘Walter Mitty’ who imagines himself to be a character in a novel.”