Libel case against Daily Nebraskan dismissed

A Lancaster County judge dismissed the libel lawsuit against the Daily Nebraskan on Wednesday.

Third District Judge Jodi Nelson said at the end of the trial that in public libel cases, the law is clear: The plaintiff must prove the statement published was false and the maker of the statements has serious doubts the statement was false at the publication date.

There was no evidence of the legal standard presented during the trial, Nelson said.

"The judge has to make a decision based on the evidence," said Robert Prokop, a former University of Nebraska regent. "Obviously, she made that decision in that way."

The lawsuit began in October 2007 when Prokop filed against the Daily Nebraskan for a staff editorial published Oct. 24, 2006.

The editorial, titled "Regents must be held to high standards," mentioned a guest column written by Prokop in the early 1970s and said Prokop plagiarized the article.

A few weeks after the editorial was published, a new regent was elected to the NU Board of Regents. Prokop, who ran for a position against current regent Jim McClurg, lost the election.

In the lawsuit, Prokop stated the editorial had "inexcusably exposed (him) to public hatred and dislike" and caused him to not be elected to the Board of Regents.

Prokop, who represented himself, sought $700,000 in damages.

The judge dismissed the case before Shawn Renner, the attorney representing the Daily Nebraskan, presented his case, and the only witnesses questioned were those chosen by Prokop. Those witnesses were McClurg and his wife Lori McClurg, the director of operations and marketing at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management; Don Walton, adviser to the Daily Nebraskan; Gary Seacrest, former editor of the Daily Nebraskan in the fall of 1971; Dan Shattil, the general manager of the Daily Nebraskan, and Prokop.

The DVD of Jenna Johnson's deposition was shown to the jury. Johnson served as the editor of the Daily Nebraskan in 2006 and now works for The Washington Post. Chancellor Harvey Perlman and former chancellor Martin Massengale were issued subpoenas for Wednesday but neither came to the trial.

McClurg did not know why he was called to the stand by Prokop.

"Dr. Prokop is running this case because he brought this suit against the Daily Nebraskan," McClurg said. "I'm not sure why he called me."

Prokop needed to prove the statement published was false, the column he wrote in the 1970s was brought to question.

In the fall of 1971, the Daily Nebraskan published a set of four stories about homosexuality in Lincoln, a controversial topic at that time.

Prokop submitted a guest column to the Daily Nebraskan toward the end of the fall 1971 semester about homosexuality as a disease. But the Daily Nebraskan never published the column.

On Jan. 14, 1972, the Douglas County Gazette published the column written by Prokop and included a note saying the Daily Nebraskan had refused to publish the column.

The Daily Nebraskan published an article on Feb. 10, 1972, comparing Prokop's article to a book written by Edmund Bergler, M.D., in 1957 titled "Homosexualtiy: Disease or Way of Life."