Jury Awards Damages for Communist Label

A California jury has awarded $4.5 million in libel damages to a Vietnamese-language newspaper whose CEO was called a communist and an agent of the Vietnamese government in a column in the competing Little Saigon News.

The plaintiff argued that falsely labellng someone as a communist has a particular resonance in the Vietnamese-American community.

The same argument was successfully used in prior cases in California, Minnesota and Washington.