A couple weeks ago, we told you about Patricia Cornwell‘s libel suit against Leslie Sachs, the culmination of a lopsided feud that stretched back seven years, when Cornwell got an injunction against Sachs to make him stop claiming she’d ripped off his story idea. He didn’t stop; in fact, he started calling her an anti-Semite and claiming she’d tried to put a hit out on him.
Well, the AP reports the upshot of the libel case, as a federal judge granted a permanent injunction against Sachs. Tuesday’s ruling determined that Sachs’ attacks on Cornwell were, as Larry O’Dell writes, “not only false but were ‘calculated to expose plaintiff to public contempt or ridicule’ and were published with actual malice, thus clearing the high bar the law has set for libeling a public figure.” Whether this will actually stop Sachs, who’s been living in Europe to evade Cornwell’s lawyers, from saying all those terrible things about her remains to be seen, although one supposes he could always just concentrate on the reasonably safe knocks that other people have been making for years, like that whole Jack the Ripper thing.