School District Sued by Students Over High School Newspaper Sex Story
Four current and former high school students in Washington state sued the Puyallup School District in federal court yesterday, contending that their names were used without their permission in a student newspaper article about their sex lives.
Students contend that they spoke to JagWire reporters at Emerald Ridge High based on a promise of anonymity, and then were sexually harassed, mocked and jeered after the story ran identifying them by name and recounting details of their sex lives, reports the Seattle Times.
Although the Times doesn’t make clear exactly what the theory of the case is, it reports that attorney Nathan Roberts of the Connelly Law Offices in Tacoma, who is representing the plaintiffs, criticized the school for not better-supervising the students working on the school newspaper.
Roberts told ABAJournal.com that he filed a federal Title IX civil rights claim with several pendent state-law tort claims on the current and former students’ behalf:
The Title IX claim focuses on the school district’s alleged deliberate indifference to the sexual harassment contained in the at-issue article it allowed to be published, he explains, as well as classroom discussions thereafter, including some involving plaintiffs. He also contends that the plaintiffs were “being called all sorts of names” both inside and outside the classroom after the article was published, and that article was entered in a statewide student journalism contest, further publicizing the plaintiffs’ comments.
The pendent state-law causes of action alleged are invasion of privacy by disclosure of private facts; negligent hiring and supervision; ordinary negligence; and outrage.
“This is a high-school journalism class that is supposed to be supervised, and the journalism instructor is letting the students do whatever they want with the paper,” Roberts told the Times.
A spokeswoman for the school district declined to comment to the Times.
Although Roberts says the lawsuit against the Puyallup School District contains no contract-based claim, one well-known media law case did make such a claim concerning a breached promise of anonymity. Two Minnesota newspapers were sued in the 1980s after they independently reneged on promises of confidentiality to a political supporter who provided them with documents damaging to his candidate’s opponent.
The U.S. Supreme Court held in 1991 in Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. that the First Amendment did not bar a promissory estoppel claim in such a case, as is discussed in an excerpt of the court’s opinion provided by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.
