Free Speech Rocks!

 

Today, Babcock is happy to talk about Oprah. As he sits in his modest corner office in downtown Houston, he says he doesn’t mind answering the questions, though he makes it clear that he’s done a heck of a lot more work than just being Oprah Winfrey’s attorney seven years ago.

 

“If you’re gonna be linked to somebody, Oprah is a pretty good person to get linked to,” Babcock says with a smile that hints he’s probably said that a few hundred times before. “I don’t get tired of people asking me about it. In fact, I think about it a lot. And it was an important case. But if I had just sort of shut it down and not really tried any cases after that win … well, shame on me.”

 

The thing about Babcock, though, is that he doesn’t shut it down. He may never shut it down. As a partner at Jackson Walker, Babcock has emerged as one of the country’s most renowned defenders of the First Amendment. He’s been successful in more than a dozen defamation cases regarding the media — always on the side of free speech and freedom of the press.

 

In fact, he’s just returned from Chicago, where he won what he calls “an extraordinarily important” libel case on behalf of the Chicago Tribune. The case centered around a series of articles examining inequities in the criminal justice system.

 

Says Maury Possley, criminal justice reporter at the Chicago Tribune, “Chip was tremendously effective, not only in court but in helping me prepare for court. He sat me down and asked me to create a timeline of the events of the case. It was a very valuable tool, and coincidentally, a great journalist exercise.”

 

“The Tribune was so proud of what they had done,” says Babcock. “This journalism had effected real change, real results. [Illinois’] governor cited this body of work as one of the reasons he commuted the death sentences for all the people on death row.”

 

However, a local prosecutor felt defamed in one of the articles, based on the paraphrasing of statements made to the grand jury. So he sued the writers and the Tribune. Had he prevailed, the press as an institution might have been intimidated into relaxing its aggressive pursuits of similar investigative projects. A win for the prosecution would also have been a major influence on future jurors’ attitudes about the integrity and fairness of such journalism.

 

“This was such a major case that there were other prosecutors coming into the courtroom to watch this trial and give support [to the prosecutor]. In fact, I overheard one of them saying something like ‘You’re doing this for all of us,’” Babcock recalls.

 

The jury took a mere three hours to decide that there was a factual error, but nothing defamatory or malicious. But the fact that Babcock had to slug it out for three weeks doesn’t augur well for this type of journalistic pursuit. “Who knows what would have happened if the results had come out the other way?” says Babcock. “Whether it’s the Chicago Tribune or the Houston Chronicle or the Los Angeles Times, if a prosecutor is able to prevail in a case like this, over a small misattribution, there could be very serious consequences. Instead of tackling the big issues, the media organizations are going to say to themselves, ‘If we’re just going to get sued over this, let’s instead just go see how Jennifer Aniston is doing.’”

 

When the verdict was read, members of his legal team and the defendants felt such relief that they had to fight back tears. “I was kind of emotional about it too,” says Babcock. “I wasn’t crying, but I came close.”

 

 

 

Because everybody asks about Oprah, it doesn’t always get reported that part of the reason Babcock zealously defends the First Amendment is because he’s practically got printer’s ink in his blood. He was born in Brooklyn, and his father worked for the New York Herald Tribune in their book review section. Babcock remembers being in the pressroom when he was 5 years old and the pressman setting his name in type. It was his first byline, but not his last.

 

The family moved to Florida, where he continued his interest in the press. “I published a neighborhood newspaper when I was 11 called the West Palm Beach News, and I sold it around a two- or three-block radius. I charged a dime and wrote all this crazy stuff in it,” says Babcock.

 

During his junior year of high school, he worked part-time for the sports section of the Miami Herald. That led to a full-time position each summer during college, and to his very first taste of media litigation.

 

“There was a lawsuit filed against the paper about an article I had something to do with,” Babcock says. “We wrote about a high school football coach who had been fired, and the mayor was mad about the article. I don’t know if I was even served. I was never deposed, and as I understand it the case got dismissed. But I was on the edge.”

 

After graduating from Brown University he had job offers from the Herald as well as Sports Illustrated and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He ultimately chose Philly, though some [In fact, I] might question why he would turn down Sports Illustrated, then, as now, the bible of sports journalism. “It was a shitty job that didn’t pay very much,” explains Babcock. At this point I remind Babcock that this is journalism we’re talking about — and it never pays well. Babcock replies that his offer from SI was “especially shitty.”

 

Babcock wrote columns about the Philly area high school and college sports teams. The response he got to those essays reimpressed upon him how the power of the press moves people to respond with their own opinionated speech — and sometimes further.

 

“I was walking into the Palestra arena one afternoon to cover a basketball game. Someone from behind me goes, ‘Yo, Chip,’ and I turn around and this fist comes that close to my face … holy smokes,” he says while demonstrating how he had to duck a sucker punch thrown by a guy who strongly disagreed with his writing. “At that same game, the team I had written would be the loser was killing the other team. While I’m sitting at the press table, the guy sitting next to me says, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ These kids sitting across the court have this big sign that says, BABCOCK SUCKS. A certain form of free speech, I guess.”

 

Babcock wrote in Philadelphia for two years. He dated a girl at Yale, and as long as he was driving regularly to the campus anyway, he decided to audit a class on constitutional law. He took the midterm exam and wrote on the outside of the booklet that the professor didn’t have to read it, since he was auditing the course anyway. The professor did read it, however, and informed him that he had written the best exam in the class. Two years later, he was attending Boston University’s School of Law.