Court Finds No Actual Malice in Communist Claim

I've written before how courts in California, Minnesota and Washington have held that calling someone a Communist can be the basis of a valid libel claim when the audience is the Vietnamese-American community. One of these cases ended with a $4.5 million jury verdict, which led to the takeover of the newspaper defendant in that case.

Now a Texas appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of a suit by an Assembly candidate against a the editor of a Vietnamese language magazine for accusing the candidate of sympathizing with the communist regime in Vietnam.

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.

Lesson of "Communist" Libel Cases in Vietnamese Community: Know Your Audience

(cross posted at the Citizen Media Law Project)
In the United States after the Cold War, saying that someone is a Communist may not have the same sting that it did during the the decades of tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies.

But within the past three years, courts in California, Minnesota and Washington have held that calling someone a Communist can be the basis of a valid libel claim when the audience is the Vietnamese-American community, which consists mostly of refugees who fled the Communist regime in their native land after the Vietnam War.