Our long national nightmare is over. Today a judge threw out a multi-million dollar defamation suit against Jerry Seinfeld in regards to statements he said about an author suing his wife over her "cookbook" Deceptively Delicious. So we're all clear: Jerry Seinfeld does not really think that the woman who claimed his wife was a plagiarist was an wacky assassin? Okay?
A quick review! Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica wrote a cookbook about tricking your kids into eating good-for-them foods which hit stores in 2008. Author Missy Chase Lapine felt the book was too close to her own book, The Sneaky Chef, which had been rejected twice by Seinfeld's publisher and so sued, claiming plagiarism. Then Jerry said some disparaging things about Lapine to David Letterman on national television (without naming Lapine, he called her a "wacko" and then elaborated “I have wackos, you have wackos. And, you know, if you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins. Mark David Chapman. And you know, James Earl Ray. So that's my concern.”). Eventually the plagiarism suit got thrown out of court and so Lapine sued again, this time over the Letterman remarks. Got that? Good. Because now it is all over.
In a ruling today Justice Marcy Friedman found nothing to go on in Lapine's suit. "Seinfeld, a well-known comedian, made the statements in question primarily on the Letterman show, a late-night entertainment program, during a comedic interchange between Seinfeld and Letterman. The interchange was repeatedly punctuated by laughter from the audience," she wrote. Further, she points out that "Seinfeld's statements disparage Lapine's claims of plagiarism as false or baseless or, more colloquially, wacky. As statements of opinion about the lack of merit of [Lapine's] claims, they are not actionable."
Of course it isn't over until Newman delivers the mail, so naturally Lapine's lawyers is considering "the options of a possible appeal." Somewhere, in some fictional New York, Jackie Chiles is mumbling "That's totally inappropriate. It's lewd, vesivius, salacious, outrageous!"
