Just tell me when I can get in line for tickets to attend the trial: Rather v. CBS

I haven't seen the complaint yet, but I can hardly wait, and I'd eagerly pay my own way to NYC to watch the trial or even any significant pretrial hearings in this new lawsuit (h/t InstaPundit):

Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against CBS, alleging that the network made him a "scapegoat" for a discredited story about President Bush's National Guard service.

The 75-year-old Rather, whose final months were clouded by controversy over the report, says the complaint stems from "CBS' intentional mishandling" of the aftermath of the story.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also names CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, Viacom Inc., Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. (At the time Viacom Inc. owned CBS. But Viacom and CBS Corp. split into two different companies in January 2006.)

Rather, the former anchorman of the "CBS Evening News," is seeking $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

My first reaction upon reading this was to wonder whether the appropriate statute of limitations had already run. But I can't answer that question, because I can't tell from this story what type of claim Rather's purporting to make. I don't recall studying the tort of "intentional mishandling of a news story aftermath" in law school, but maybe I was sick that day.

My glee is tempered by my realization that this case is almost certainly going to go away before it gets to any good stuff. But oh! it would be fun to watch CBS be forced to justify its putting of Rather out to pasture in a not-quite-firing by showing all of the grounds it had. Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here's a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned! (I continue to take pride in the high ranking of this post of mine from 2004 in search engine responses to the words "Dan Rather fired.")

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UPDATE (Wed Sep 19 @ 10:40pm): One of my regular readers and commenters provided a link to the complaint in a comment below, for which I'm grateful.

The law firm that Rather has retained, Chicago-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, is indeed a good firm. The complaint that Sonnenschein's New York office has filed on Dan Rather's behalf, however, is a nicely buffed and polished piece of garbage. The lawyers who wrote it appear to have been infected with Rather's own delusions, as becomes clear when one gets to numbered paragraph 3 on the second page:

The Broadcast incorporated copies of documents written by Mr. Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian ("Documents"), corroborating important aspects of the story.

Not "purportedly written" or "allegedly written," mind you, but just "written." Later in the complaint (at pp. 19-21), while not quite affirmatively asserting that the "Documents" are indeed genuine, Rather's lawyers come very close to that by alleging that Erik Rigler, a private investigator hired by CBS, had reported to a CBS executive that "he was of the opinion that the Killian Documents were most likely authentic," but that Rigler's conclusion was covered up in the report of the CBS Investigatory Panel, and that CBS then prevented Rather from having any further contact with Rigler.

This is too funny to be believed, coming from the news anchor who actively participated in the suppression and ignoring of CBS' own experts' reservations about the authenticity of the Killian Documents before the broadcast ever aired.

But put aside the fact that his lawyers have apparently bought into Rather's paranoid schizophrenia on the facts. Let me tell you in a single paragraph why "garbage" is about the nicest term that can be applied to this pleading.

Rather's lawyers allege a claim for breach of contract based on an oral understanding for a contract extension that, by their own admission, was never consummated and never reduced to writing. They ignore what I'm quite sure will be a devastating waiver/estoppel counter-argument by CBS that Rather kept cashing his paychecks for many months until he finally left the network a few months before the scheduled expiration of his written contract. [See revision note below.] They allege that CBS was Rather's "fiduciary" — and I'm sorry, but that's so badly wrong as a matter of law that every one of the Sonnenschien lawyers whose name appears on this complaint ought to be sanctioned for making it (because when it comes to negotiating extensions of your employment contract, your employer is not your fiduciary but your adversary). Their tort claims against the CBS execs in their individual capacity don't even attempt to allege facts to show that they were acting outside their corporate employment capacities — making those another set of claims that are, in my judgment, so wrong as a matter of law as to be sanctionable. And the fraud claims consist of all the other claims repackaged along with an allegation that the defendants' bad acts were deliberate, and that the defendants fooled poor ol' Dan about their true and truly evil intentions for a really long time.

Do not misunderstand me to be saying that CBS did everything, or much of anything, even mostly right or in an even approximately timely fashion. They covered for Rather and his team for far too long, and the Thornburgh-Boccardi Panel was far too timid and equivocal in its findings. Rather and everyone else should have been publicly exposed, condemned, and fired for cause by CBS no later than September 15, 2004. And for trying to paper over Rather and his cohorts' fraud instead of simply calling it what it actually was, and for keeping Rather on the payroll instead of putting him on the street with all his "literally dozens of Emmy Awards" in a stack of cardboard boxes, CBS does, in a sense, very much "deserve" this lawsuit.

But if CBS has the guts to fight it — and that is an open question — CBS will win it. You can bet the ranch on it.

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UPDATE (Thu Sep 20 @ 6:30am): Yeah, Rather's lead lawyer is just as nuts as he is. From Howard Kurtz in today's WaPo:

[Martin] Gold, Rather's lawyer, maintained that "nobody's proved the documents were forgeries. The way we look at it, it's more than likely the documents are authentic."

Let me give you another indication from the complaint just how entirely out of touch these lawyers are with how this all developed. From paragraph 8 (at page 3), during the introduction to the complaint (emphasis mine):

Central to the defendants' plan to pacify the White House was to offer Mr. Rather as the public face of the story, and as a scapegoat for CBS management's bungling of the entire episode — which, as a direct result, became known publicly as "Rathergate."

But it wasn't "Rathergate"; it was, most emphatically, "Ra^thergate." (On September 10, 2004, as the new name was sweeping across the blogosphere (and doing so with absolutely no prompting from CBS management), I posted instructions for "the html-challenged" on how to do the superscript.) And if Martin Gold knew even that simple fact, and why it's important, he couldn't possibly be quoted in the New York Times as saying "it's more than likely the documents are authentic."