Benanti v. Satterfield

MICHAEL BENANTI v. JAMIE SATTERFIELD ET AL.

No. E2018-01848-COA-R3-CV

COURT OF APPEALS OF TENNESSEE AT KNOXVILLE

October 16, 2019 Session

March 27, 2020

Appeal from the Circuit Court for Knox County

No. 1-414-17

Kristi M. Davis, Judge

This is a defamation case. Michael Benanti (plaintiff) was convicted of committing multiple felonies, including: armed bank extortion, kidnapping, and carjacking. He is serving four consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in California. Shortly after his incarceration, plaintiff filed a complaint against Jamie Satterfield, the Knoxville News Sentinel, and USA Today (defendants), seeking $3,000,000 in damages. Plaintiff alleged that defendants defamed him by falsely reporting that the FBI suspected plaintiff of committing additional crimes, including murder. The trial court granted defendants' motion to dismiss and subsequently denied plaintiff's motion to alter or amend. Plaintiff appeals. We affirm.

Tenn. R. App. P. 3 Appeal as of Right; Judgment of the Circuit Court Affirmed; Case Remanded

CHARLES D. SUSANO, JR., J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which D. MICHAEL SWINEY, C.J., and JOHN W. MCCLARTY, J., joined.

Michael Benanti, Atwater, California, appellant, pro se.

Richard L. Hollow, Knoxville, Tennessee, for the appellees, Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel, and USA Today.

OPINION

I.

On November 17, 2017, plaintiff filed a complaint against defendants for "defamation of character, slander, [and] libel." Because this case was dismissed pursuant to Tenn. R. Civ. P. 12, we must accept plaintiff's factual allegations as true. Accordingly, we set forth plaintiff's factual allegations verbatim:

Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel wrote several full featured articles detailing how the FBI alleged that I killed Natasha Bogoev. She writes about motive, opportunity, cover up of the crime, and fills in details with no factual basis.

Moreover I personally exchanged emails with Ms. Satterfield and informed her that her facts were wrong. I requested a retraction or at least she check her facts before she continue writing fabricated lies. The information I provided her was 1. Her death was ruled a suicide by the police and coroner. 2. She bought the gun that day, alone. 3. She checked into a hotel room on the 2^nd floor with no opening windows and locked the room from within. 4. She left a suicide note. 5. Kathy McGrath was the last person to see her alive. 6. Government star witness told FBI I was in North Carolina at the time of her death.

Ms. Satterfield armed with this knowledge continued to write several more articles (in excess of 30 articles altogether) where she continued to spread this knowing false accusation. See Exhibit - some of the articles she wrote, Exhibit A 1-5.

To a lesser extent she also wrote that my company was a scam and that I stole from it as well as placed bank robbery money into it. None of these claims were proven during the criminal trial.

Ms. Satterfield's blatant disregard for the truth and knowing deceit on the public has affected my life in a most profound way. Including but not limited to alienation & abandonment by loved ones or supporters, a poisoning of the criminal jury pool, emotional & mental stress & anguish, pain & suffering beyond explaining and made it difficult and obstructed my ability to defend myself in the criminal trial, loss of reputation.

Plaintiff attached excerpts from online articles published by defendants before, during, and after plaintiff's criminal trial. Plaintiff underlined dozens of phrases and sentences in these articles. In accordance with our duty to liberally construe pleadings filed by a pro se litigant, see Moorhead v. Allman, No. M2009-01822-COA-R3-CV, 2011 WL 676017, at *5 n.2 (Tenn. Ct. App., filed Feb. 24, 2011), we presume that theunderlined portions are the allegedly defamatory statements. The following is a representative sample of those allegedly defamatory statements:¹

Benanti stands accused of plotting a series of violent crimes in six states and carrying out those misdeeds in four of them, including Tennessee. Those crimes include carjacking, kidnapping, bank robbery and extortion. He is accused of kidnapping three East Tennessee bank officials and their families - one in Oak Ridge in April 2015; one in Knoxville in July 2015; and one in Elizabethton in October 2015 - and of similar extortions in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

The FBI alleges Benanti, an ex-con, recruited Brian Witham, whom he met in federal prison, to rob banks and a grocery store, steal cars and hold families hostage to force the bank employees to rob their employers - all to get money to funnel back into a sham business from which Benanti was embezzling. The FBI also has alleged Benanti killed his girlfriend . . . , who found out about his crimes, and staged her death to look like a suicide. He has not been charged in that death.

* * *

In the kidnappings, entire families, including children, were held hostage. Guns were pointed at the heads of a baby and a toddler while their bound parents watched helplessly. A fake bomb was strapped to the elderly mother of one extortion victim.

Exhibit A-3 (underlining in original).

Benanti and Witham met in federal prison in the 1990s, both serving time for robberies. When Benanti was freed in 2008, he launched Prisoner Assistant, a firm he said would help future ex-cons by investing money for them while they were behind bars and teaching them financial skills. Witham joined the firm upon his release.

The Wall Street Journal profiled the firm in 2014 - unaware the company was, according to the FBI, a sham from which Benanti was stealing. Witham has told authorities Benanti was desperate to keep up the sham and concocted the bank extortion plot as a way to keep Prisoner Assistant afloat. The FBI has alleged Benanti's girlfriend, Natasha Bogoev, discovered his thievery and, perhaps, the hostage-takings, so he killed her inside a hotel in a small town in Pennsylvania, staged it as a suicide and had her body cremated. He has not been charged in the death, because authorities have no body.

Exhibit A-1, A-2 (underlining in original).

[Assistant U.S. Attorney David] Lewen and the FBI suspect, but cannot yet prove, that Benanti might well be a killer.

* * *

Police quickly ruled [Natasha Bogoev's] death a suicide. Benanti convinced her brother to have her cremated. Benanti spread her ashes in the Bahamas and then dashed off for a tryst with his stripper girlfriend.

The FBI would later learn the gun found in the hotel room had been fired twice. A pillow showed the imprint of a head surrounded by blood splatter, but Bogoev's body was found on the floor. No autopsy was conducted. Now, none can be. Benanti still bristles over the FBI's suspicion he killed Bogoev or hired someone to do it, and it's unlikely, given his convictions last week, the case would be reopened.

Exhibits A-4, A-6 (underlining in original).

The articles purport to rely on various sources, including: "prior court records," "trial brief[s]" filed by prosecutors, "FBI documents," "FBI records," and "hundreds of pages of FBI affidavits made public last week[.]" Notably, plaintiff does not take issue with defendants' reporting about the crimes for which he was ultimately convicted. Instead, plaintiff argues that defendants defamed him by reporting that the FBI suspected plaintiff of committing additional crimes, including murder.

Defendants filed a Tenn. R. Civ. P. 12.02(6) motion to dismiss and a memorandum of law in support thereof. Defendants also attached a copy of the judgment entered against plaintiff in his criminal trial. Defendants did not attach the underlying source material for their articles. In their motion to dismiss, defendants argued:

1. That the [p]laintiff, being a public figure, has not pled and cannot prove actual malice; that is, knowledge of falsehood or reckless disregard by clear and convincing evidence.

2. Any publications complained of are protected by [the fair-reporting] privilege and, therefore, not actionable as a matter of law.

3. The [p]laintiff, has no reputation which can be damaged and is, therefore, libel-proof and cannot, as a matter of law, establish the requisites for a damage claim.

Plaintiff did not respond to defendants' motion. Accordingly, on February 23, 2018, the trial court dismissed the complaint with prejudice. On March 8, 2018, plaintiff filed a "motion to reinstate lawsuit," with the court construed as a motion to set aside the order of dismissal. In his motion, plaintiff explained that he was never served with defendants' motion to dismiss. Apparently, the letter containing defendants' motion was withheld from plaintiff because it was delivered to the prison in the wrong color envelope. The trial court provided plaintiff a copy of defendants' motion to dismiss and gave plaintiff additional time to file a written response.

Plaintiff filed a response to the motion to dismiss and attached several exhibits, including Ms. Bogoev's suicide note, documentation relating to FBI witness interviews, and transcripts of witness testimony from plaintiff's criminal trial. Plaintiff argued that he was not a public figure; that he sufficiently pled actual malice; that defendants could not rely on the fair-reporting privilege; and that plaintiff was not libel-proof. On July 11, 2018, the trial court ruled that plaintiff's arguments "do not warrant a reversal of the [c]ourt's decision to grant the motion to dismiss." Accordingly, the court denied plaintiff's motion to set aside the order of dismissal.

On July 30, 2018, plaintiff filed a "motion for reconsideration and hearing." On October 9, 2018, before the trial court ruled on that motion, plaintiff filed a notice of appeal. This Court remanded the case to the trial court for the purposes of ruling on plaintiff's July 30, 2018 motion, which, if construed as a motion to alter or amend, would extend the time for filing plaintiff's otherwise untimely notice of...