Dominican sugar executives are public figures, court rules

Two sugar-cane plantation owners from the Dominican Republic must satisfy a higher standard reserved for public figures if they are to prevail in a libel suit against American filmmakers who made a documentary critical of the Caribbean nation's sugar industry, a federal court of appeals has ruled.

Juan and Felipe Vicini Lluberes, who are brothers, sued Uncommon Productions for allegedly libelous statements made in the 2007 documentary The Price of Sugar, which criticized the treatment of Haitian laborers in Dominican sugarcane plantations. The key issue in the libel case concerns whether the brothers, who spoke to the media about their depiction in the documentary, are private or public figures.

According to an opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston (First Circuit) issued in November, Juan and Felipe Vicini Lluberes qualify as limited-purpose public figures. A limited-purpose public figure is private citizen who becomes well-known for a particular issue, but isn't necessarily a household name.

Because the brothers "leveraged their positions and contacts to influence a favorable outcome" in a controversy over the treatment of their workers, they must show that any false statements in the film were made with actual malice, the court of appeals ruled.

The case narrowly limits the circumstances in which a plaintiff has a right to reply in the media without becoming a limited-purpose public figure, said Elizabeth Koch, attorney for Uncommon Productions.

The Price of Sugar presents a scathing view of living conditions in the worker-populated plantation villages, called bateyes, according to the district court opinion in the case. These conditions include poor housing, inadequate nutrition and sanitation, and a lack of education for children in the bateyes, the district court wrote. The film focuses in large part on the actions of Father Christopher Hartley, a Catholic priest who has worked to improve living conditions for the workers.

The brothers pointed to seven statements in the film, some by Hartley and others by the film's narrator or other individuals, that the brothers say falsely implied that they ordered murders and kidnappings, and that the living conditions on their plantations were unsafe. They say that photographs of malnourished and injured workers that were used in the film actually depicted conditions at other plantations that they did not own, the district court wrote.

The brothers argued that any public spotlight they had claimed for themselves was only in response to defamatory statements made against them, and therefore they should not be held to the more demanding libel standard generally reserved for public officials and other public figures. The court of appeals disagreed, writing that the brothers took "little if any action directly in response" to articles critical of them, but instead engaged in an extended public relations campaign that went beyond any "right of response" they might have had.

Two other issues in the case involved whether the brothers were public figures in the United States or only in the Dominican Republic, and whether an annotated list of sources for the film created to obtain liability insurance was protected by the attorney-client privilege. On the first issue, the court ruled that the scope of the controversy extended to the United States partly because the brothers' company received sugar subsidies from the federal government, and because the controversy "resounded" in the U.S. The court of appeals instructed the district court to reconsider the second issue.