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Case 18-2868, Document 279, 08/09/2019, 2628231, Page33 of 37
Under New York law, a defendant’s allegedly defamatory statement is held “to a standard
of substantial, not literal, accuracy.” Law Firm of Daniel P. Foster, 844 F.2d at 959. Here,
Ms. Maxwell’s first sentence literally is true: more than one of plaintiff’s allegations are
“untrue.” Accordingly, there is no defamation.
Sentence No. 2. The second sentence at issue in this action states, “The original
allegations are not new and have been fully responded to and shown to be untrue.” Plaintiff
alleges the sentence is defamatory to the extent it asserts the original allegations were “shown to
be untrue.” Doc.1 4 30. Plaintiff cannot prove this statement’s falsity.
It is a matter of pure opinion whether any given allegation was “shown” to be untrue.
Some people require more proof than others to conclude that a fact has been “shown to be
untrue.” We discussed above various examples of this, e.g., climate change. Here, Ms. Maxwell
via Mr. Barden in March 2011 issued a statement denying plaintiff’s Churcher-story allegations
as “all entirely false.” Doc.542-3, Ex.C. Plaintiff did not respond to this statement, let alone
claim it was defamatory. Her non-response reasonably could be seen as a concession that
Ms. Maxwell’s denial was righteous. See Doc.542-7, Ex.K (Mr. Barden: “I would have been
remiss if I had sat back and not issued a denial, and the press had published that Ms. Maxwell
had not responded to enquiries and had not denied the new allegations; the public might have
taken the silence as an admission there was some truth in the in allegations.”).
Regardless, we easily can show two of plaintiff's original allegations are untrue. Many of
plaintiff's original allegations are contained in the two Churcher articles, Docs.542-1 & 542-2,
Exs.A & B. The articles contained numerous allegations by plaintiff relating to her alleged
sexual abuse. In her deposition, plaintiff was shown Deposition Exhibit 7, a collection of some of
her allegations in the articles. Plaintiff placed checkmarks by those allegations she admitted—
over the course of 20 pages of testimony—were not true. See Menninger Decl. EXHIBIT PP, at
28
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| Filename | DocumentCloud_Epstein_Docs_p00815.png |
| File Size | 324.7 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.9% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,211 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04 12:26:25.511828 |