Judge Rejects Lawsuit Against TV Comedian

A Superior Court judge has dismissed one of two $10-million defamation lawsuits against comedian Arsenio Hall, citing both the entertainer’s right to free speech and a case backlog, an attorney said today.

Hall was sued for calling Willis Edwards, a former NAACP official, an “extortionist” and “tennis-shoe pimp.”

But Judge Ernest G. Williams dismissed the case Thursday, ruling that “as a matter of law” no defamation had occurred and that he would “bite the bullet” and let the state Court of Appeal determine the question because his court backlog did not allow him the time to spend 30 days on a case that would be appealed regardless of the outcome.

“We will appeal immediately,” Geraldine Green, Edwards’ attorney, said in response to the decision.

Green said she was “outraged” by the judge’s decision to dismiss the case to save time.

In his Jan. 20, 1989, suit, Edwards, the former president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, charged that Hall had referred to him as an “extortionist” in both an interview broadcast over KACE radio and printed in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a newspaper that serves a predominantly black readership.

The statements were made after a November, 1988, meeting in which Hall claimed Edwards demanded a $40,000 contribution to the NAACP to prevent Edwards from publicly announcing that Hall had not hired a sufficient number of blacks to work on his talk show.

After the meeting, Edwards issued a press release claiming that Hall said there were not enough qualified blacks to serve as writers, directors or producers on the show.

Hall’s attorney, Morton G. Rosen, charged that the statements Hall made about Edwards were an expression of Hall’s right to free speech.

The judge agreed. “The evidence shows a free, public debate, which is protected by the United States Constitution, based upon this society’s very high value placed upon freedom of speech,” Williams wrote in his ruling.