Stop the Press: A Baseball Legend and Biography

This chapter explores Warren Spahn's lawsuit against a publishing house in Spahn v. Julian Messner, Inc. Spahn was remarkable baseball pitcher and a veteran of World War II. In 1964, Julian Messner Inc. published a child-targeted biography (called in the business at the time, a juvenile biography) of Spahn, who then sued to stop publication on the grounds that it violated all four of the tenants of privacy: invasion, false light, private facts, and appropriation. The Warren Spahn Story told the story of the perfect man: a good son, a good baseball player, a good husband, and a good soldier. The author of the book admitted that his research consisted of looking at a few magazine stories and clippings, and that he had made no effort to speak with Spahn himself, his family, his teammates, or any of his friends or acquaintances. Spahn won an injunction against future distribution of the book and $10,000 in damages. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case re-tried using the actual malice standard of the Butts case, and Spahn won again. The decisions concluded that Spahn had the right to demand that the basic facts of his life be told accurately, and it required authors of biographies to make a good faith effort to represent their subjects truthfully.