Final_Judgment

[212] Final Judgment 273
The editors of The Spotlight felt Marchetti's article served, if anything,
as an advance warning to Hunt of what his former employers had in mind.
The Spotlight's editors didn't, in fact, feel that the article implicated Hunt in
the president's murder.
Inexplicably, however, the ex-CIA man decided to sue, even though he
ultimately admitted under oath that when he first read The Spotlight's story
that Marchetti's contentions seemed plausible indeed. In short, that Hunt did
believe that his former colleagues would be willing to throw him to the
wolves—for their own nefarious reasons.
Hunt's lawsuit against The Spotlight did go to trial. However, The
Spotlight's management did not take the lawsuit seriously. They did not
believe either that the article damaged Hunt's reputation or that Hunt's
attorneys could prove that the newspaper had published the article
maliciously.
(In fact, The Spotlight had invited Hunt to visit the newspaper's
editorial offices for an interview to rebut the claims made in Marchetti's
article or to even write an article rebutting Marchetti's article.)
During that trial, The Spotlight's attorney unexpectedly stipulated that
the newspaper did not believe that Hunt had been in Dallas on November
22, 1963. The trial, however, resulted in a massive $650,000 libel judgment
against the newspaper. The Spotlight appealed the judgment and the appeals
court granted a new trial on the basis that the trial judge's instructions to the
jury had been faulty .
LANE ENTERS THE CASE
It was at this point that famed JFK assassination investigator Mark
Lane, an attorney, entered into the case—almost purely by chance, having
been introduced to the publisher of The Spotlight by a mutual acquaintance
shortly before the case was heard on appeal.
Based upon his own decades of intensive research, Lane had long been
convinced that the CIA had been instrumental in orchestrating the JFK
assassination, but he had never had a legal forum in which to conduct an
investigation of this sort.
The new trial—which took place in 1985 (some seven years after the
controversial article had first been published) gave him that opportunity.
Lane launched The Spotlight's defense with a very different approach.
He contended that Hunt had indeed been in Dallas just prior to the
president's murder and that he would be able to prove it. This took Hunt's
lawyers by surprise, to say the least, but despite their efforts to derail Lane's
new approach, they were unsuccessful.
The key witness in the second libel trial (conducted in Miami) was
Marita Lorenz, a former CIA operative who had testified before the House
Assassinations Committee in 1978, relating what information she had in
connection with the president's assassination.
Yet, despite the inflammatory nature of what Miss Lorenz had told the
committee, her testimony was discounted by the House Committee director