The cause of the distress was an admittedly vulgar spoof in the Hustler magazine. It depicted Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and a famous crusader for morality, as a drunken hypocrite who lost his virginity to his mother in a Virginia outhouse.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, explaining why the damage verdict could not stand, said most people would consider the Hustler spoof "gross and repugnant." But, he declared, "we think the First Amendment prohibits such a result in the area of public debate about public figures."
"Were we to hold otherwise, political cartoonists and satirists would be subjected to damage awards without any showing that their work falsely defamed its subject," Rehnquist said.
It is not enough for a political official or public figure to prove that his attacker was motivated by hatred or ill-will and intentionally sought to hurt his feelings, Rehnquist wrote.
The First Amendment guarantee of free speech and press requires a public figure to prove that the statement about him was false and made with reckless disregard as to whether it was true, the chief justice wrote. That standard, the constitutional test for libel since 1964, makes it difficult for public figures to win damages.
"The sort of robust political debate encouraged by the First Amendment is bound to produce speech that is critical of those who hold public office or those public figures who are intimately involved in the resolution of important public questions or . . . shape events in areas of concern to society at large," Rehnquist wrote in an opinion approved by an 8-0 vote.
"The art of the cartoonist," he added, "is often not reasoned or evenhanded, but slashing and one-sided." Nevertheless, he said, it has ''played a prominent role in public and political debate."
