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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