Let’s remember when the Seattle Weekly embarrassingly tried to take down true crime writer Ann Rule, on this day in 2011 (July 19)
Ann Rule might one of the most celebrated true crime writers working today, but she’s hardly infallible. The Seattle Weekly thought they had a winning takedown with a piece that ran eight years ago today, called “Ann Rule’s Sloppy Storytelling.”
The piece was written by Rick Swart and focused on the facts surrounding a case of a woman named Liysa Northon, who killed her husband in 2000. A few days later, the Weekly would add this correction:
The story below, written by Rick Swart, is about true-crime author Ann Rule, and the facts he claims she didn’t get right in her book Heart Full of Lies, an account of the 2000 shooting death of Oregon pilot Chris Northon. In Swart’s telling, Northon’s wife Liysa, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence for the murder, was failed by her original lawyer, an overzealous district attorney, and Rule, who claimed that Liysa was not the battered wife she’d portrayed herself to be, but rather a sociopath who’d concocted tales of abuse as a justification for shooting her husband.
What Swart failed to reveal to us is that he’s now engaged to Liysa.
Whoops.
Rule would go on to sue the Weekly for defamation, though her case didn’t get far. As King TV reported:
A judge has thrown out true-crime author Ann Rule s defamation lawsuit against a weekly Seattle newspaper, finding that an article accusing her of sloppy storytelling constitutes protected free speech.
Rule, who has written dozens of best-selling books, sued the Seattle Weekly and freelance author Rick Swart over a piece published in 2011. The article criticized her book about Liysa Northon, an Oregon woman who served 12 years in prison after killing her husband.
When it ran the story, the newspaper didn’t realize that Swart, then a longtime Oregon journalist, was engaged to marry Northon.
Rule said the piece damaged her reputation. King County Superior Court Judge Laura Inveen dismissed the claims in separate rulings Monday and Tuesday. She found that Rule s lawsuit violated a Washington state law aimed at barring lawsuits that target the legal exercise of free speech and public participation, and that Rule had not established there were any false, defamatory statements about her in the article.
The judge awarded Swart and Seattle Weekly $10,000 apiece, not including legal fees, as the state law requires.
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