Picture Erskine College, a private Christian college in South Carolina, located in a town with the unlikely name of “Due West.” “Due west” of what, one might ask? East Carolina? The Atlantic Ocean?
Well, anyway – it’s the early 1980s at this small college with an idyllic chapel, nestled in the woods, with its 600-odd students. For an upcoming convocation, Erskine invited a guest speaker: children’s author Robert Newton Peck, famed for his first novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die. Peck, who normally taught at another small college in Florida, flew into the Greenville–Spartanburg airport where he was supposed to be met by Mary Jo Wardlaw, an Erskine student tasked as greeter and chauffeur for Peck.
Wardlaw, sadly, either got her directions wrong or mixed up the time of Peck’s arrival. This left him, ungreeted and seething, at the airport. Peck eventually called the college’s chaplain and — very full of himself, apparently because he had once written a book about pigs — proclaimed, “You don’t keep a person of my stature waiting.” Peck grabbed a cab, and later told the chaplain he would “deal with Mary Jo the next day in convocation.”
Ah yes — the convocation. A mandatory, school-wide assembly. Mary Jo was sitting in the front row, and Peck — believing he had missed his calling as a stand-up comedian — plotted revenge.
He greets the crowd with wit doubtless sharpened by his youthful experience with butchering porcine creatures. He began by saying that he generally liked everyone, but “I hate one Erskine student, Mary Jo Warthog!” Next, he conjured a cartoonish “garbage truck” bully from his own youth, complete with “fists like cannonballs” — though it soon became clear that this, too, referred to “Mary Jo Warthog.” He even imitated her walk on stage: arms dangling in front as he hunched over as he stomped around with them each swinging into the leg on the other side.
And he just couldn’t leave it alone: “I have a recurring dream . . . I see the Warthog breeding with Roger Findley [another Erskine student] under my sink.”
Hilarious! He no doubt had them literally rolling in the aisles!
Or maybe not. Did they chuckle or gasp?
Well, one person definitely did not chuckle, though she likely did gasp: Mary Jo, held up to relentless ridicule by this featured speaker. So mortified was she after this public evisceration that she had to seclude herself in her dorm room for days. But, eventually, she roused herself enough to file a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Person of Stature.
Peck would later claim that by “breeding” he meant “breeding bugs,” not humans. Maybe you have to be a Very Famous Author to get the distinction. But his regular use of her name, altered to “Warthog,” suggested something quite different.
It happens that in South Carolina “imputing unchastity to a woman” is defamation per se — that is, the person suing need not prove harm; damages will be presumed. Eventually, a jury was instructed about this, and it pinned damages of $4,000 on Peck for Mary Jo’s harm. And, as a measure of how sidesplitting they found his “humor,” they added another $20,000 in punitive damages, to punish and make an example of him.
Peck appealed and argued, first, that the “breeding” quip couldn’t be defamatory — that the audience knew it was a joke. As an alternative, he argued that the law making “imputing unchastity to a woman” a basis for liability was gender-bias: why protect only women from false chastity charges?
Peck also tried to raise an archaic principle legal principle that his words should have been interpreted in their gentlest, bug breeding sense. Yes, it no doubt seemed that way to Mary Jo, stuck there in the front row surrounded by 600 of her closest friends.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals disagreed. Citing the jury verdict, the court concluded that the jurors had understood his words in their ordinary, “popular” meaning of “breeding” with Mr. Findley. And noting her testimony about how she barricaded herself in her room, it concluded that she was indeed harmed.
The court likewise did to his other argument what Peck had done to poor Mary Jo — ground it up like hog meat. Nope, the court responded: there was a reason to treat women differently when it came to imputing “unchastity.” The verdict stood.
There’s an old saying: Comedy is tragedy plus time. But Peck might have saved himself $24,000 (worth about $75,000 in today’s money, plus whatever he had to pay his own lawyers) if he’d simply stayed in his lane writing about pig-butchering and didn’t slice up a hapless college student from the stage.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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