Hatfill v. Foster

In 2001, anthrax was mailed to various high-profile targets. Investigators suspected Dr. Steven Hatfill (plaintiff), a biomedical researcher with the knowledge and resources to create anthrax. No hard evidence linked Hatfill to the mailings. However, in fall 2003, college professor David Foster (defendant) wrote an article that pointed to Hatfill as the mailer. Foster’s article was published in Vanity Fair, a magazine owned by Conde Nast Publications (defendant), and in Reader’s Digest, a publication of the Reader’s Digest Association (defendant). In 2004, Hatfill sued Foster and the publishers in a Virginia federal district court, asserting claims for libel and infliction of emotional distress. Foster and the publishers moved to transfer the case to a New York federal district court. In opposition, Hatfill filed an affidavit stating that although he currently lived in Washington, DC, Virginia was his state of domicile because he rented a room in Virginia from a friend, held a Virginia driver’s license, and intended to return to Virginia when the stigma of the anthrax investigation wore off. Based on those statements, when the case was transferred to the Southern District of New York, the new district judge assumed Virginia law applied because Hatfill was domiciled in Virginia. However, during discovery, it became clear that Hatfill had lied. He began leasing the Virginia room, for the negligible rent of $1 per month, only after the allegedly defamatory articles were published. Additionally, his Virginia phoneline and voter’s registration were set up post-publication. Evidence showed that at the time of publication, Hatfill was instead living in DC with his girlfriend. His possessions were in DC, and he had no car or driver’s license that would have enabled him to even visit Virginia regularly. Further, although evidence showed Hatfill had previously lived in Maryland, nothing suggested he had ever lived in Virginia. Given the new evidence, the New York district judge reconsidered her earlier decision as to which state’s substantive law governed.