Court rejects general counsel’s defamation suit over Cushman departure articles

During his tenure, he oversaw outside lawyers the company hired to answer subpoenas from the New York Attorney General. Those subpoenas were tied to a civil lawsuit alleging the Trump Organization had “engaged in financial fraud” over property valuations. Cushman received the subpoenas as a third party and was not a defendant, and the former general counsel was not a party to that case. A judge held Cushman in contempt for missing subpoena deadlines and set a daily fine. A different judge later extended the deadline, purged the contempt, and scrapped the fines. 

A month after he left, Cushman named a new general counsel. The next day, the publisher ran an article headlined “Cushman Replaces GC in Wake of Company’s Rebuke by Judge in Trump Probe.” He argued the headline made it look like he was pushed out for mishandling the subpoena response, when he says he had resigned on good terms. 

The court disagreed. The article was open to a “reasonable innocent construction,” the panel held. “In the wake of” can mean “after,” and “replaces” can mean “take the place of” rather than “fires.” Under Illinois’s defendant-friendly rule, when a statement can be read two ways – one harmful, one harmless – the harmless reading wins. 

He also said the coverage dried up his job prospects. Recruiters cooled once they found the articles, he claimed, and he pleaded $2 million a year in lost earnings, matching his Cushman pay. The court called that too speculative. He resigned, the judges noted, and never alleged he was fired because of the articles or that he had interviewed for jobs at that salary. 

For HR, the case shows the limits of an exiting executive’s recourse: when a company stays silent on why a senior person leaves, reporters can fill the gap, and coverage that stops short of saying someone was fired is hard to challenge as defamatory.