NORTH SIOUX CITY,
S.D. (AP) -- Beef Products Inc. sued ABC News, Inc. for defamation
Thursday over its coverage of a meat product that critics dub "pink
slime," claiming the network damaged the company by misleading consumers
into believing it is unhealthy and unsafe.
The
Dakota Dunes, S.D.-based meat processor is seeking $1.2 billion in
damages for roughly 200 "false and misleading and defamatory" statements
about the product officially known as lean, finely textured beef, said
Dan Webb, BPI's Chicago-based attorney.
The
lawsuit filed in a South Dakota state court also names several
individuals as defendants, including ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer and
the Department of Agriculture microbiologist who coined the term "pink
slime."
The company's reporting "caused
consumers to believe that our lean beef is not beef at all - that it's
an unhealthy pink slime, unsafe for public consumption, and that somehow
it got hidden in the meat," Webb said before the company's official
announcement.
ABC News, owned by The Walt Disney Co., denied BPI's claims.
"The
lawsuit is without merit," Jeffrey W. Schneider, the news station's
senior vice president, said in a brief statement Thursday. "We will
contest it vigorously."
The 257-page lawsuit
names American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., ABC News, Inc., Sawyer and
ABC correspondents Jim Avila and David Kerley as defendants. It also
names Gerald Zirnstein, the USDA microbiologist who named the product
"pink slime," Carl Custer, a former federal food scientist, and Kit
Foshee, a former BPI quality assurance manager who was interviewed by
ABC.
Richard McIntire, a spokesman for the
USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, declined to comment and
attempts to reach Foshee were unsuccessful.
The
Food Integrity Campaign, a whistleblower advocacy group that has worked
with Foshee, said in a statement Thursday that Foshee was fired from
BPI because he refused to participate in the company's
"misrepresentation of the product's safety to the USDA and to
consumers."
"Thanks to ABC News, Kit Foshee
and other whistleblowers shared their concerns about BPI," said Amanda
Hitt, the group's director and former counsel to Foshee after he was
fired. "Doing so took enormous courage for which they should be honored,
not attacked. We believe that this product is questionable."
Zirnstein said that he had not yet been served with the lawsuit.
"I'm
just a scientist giving my opinion. I'm not going to deal with this
nonsense," he said, referring questions to his attorney.
Although
several news organizations used the term "pink slime," Webb said ABC
was being sued for attacking the company "night after night." The
"defendants engaged in a monthlong vicious, concerted disinformation
campaign against BPI," the lawsuit claims, citing 11 TV and 14 online
reports from March 7 to April 3.
Craig Letch,
BPI's director of food-quality assurance, said the company lost 80
percent of its business in 28 days. BPI has declined to discuss how much
it lost in sales, but acknowledged it took a "substantial" hit. Some of
the customers have returned, Letch said, but not enough to allow BPI to
rehire former employees.
Webb said the
reports had a "catastrophic" impact on the company, forcing it to close
three of its four U.S. plants and lay off 700 workers.
ABC
published a list of major grocery stores that stopped selling the
product, pressuring others to follow suit by placing them on a "black
list," he said.
BPI will have to prove the
network intended to cause harm for the defamation lawsuit to succeed,
said Patrick Garry, a media law expert at the University of South Dakota
School of Law.
"The media - regardless of
your opinion of them - don't usually print something that they know to
be false," Garry said. "It may be negligent, but usually there's a
malice requirement as well."
Bill Marler, a
Seattle attorney who said he's representing Zirnstein and Custer, said
his clients were considering a counter-claim against BPI.
"Our
view is that the lawsuit against them, especially as public employees
doing their job for food inspection, is completely bogus, without merit
and frivolous," Marler said.
Critics worry
about how the meat is processed. Bits of beef are heated and treated
with a small amount of ammonia to kill bacteria, a practice that has
been used for decades and meets federal food safety standards. Webb said
that ABC ignored that information, instead giving the impression "that
it's some type of chemical product ... some kind of repulsive, horrible,
vile substance that got put into ground beef and hidden from
consumers."
The name "pink slime" gained
traction after The New York Times quoted Zirnstein in a 2009 article on
the safety of meat processing methods. In the following years, celebrity
chef Jamie Oliver began railing against it. McDonald's Corp. and other
fast food companies stopped using the product, and major supermarket
chains vowed to stop selling beef containing the low-cost product. An
online petition calling for it to be banned from school menus,
attracting hundreds of thousands of supporters.
The
U.S. Department of Agriculture has said the vast majority of states
participating in its National School Lunch Program have opted to order
ground beef that doesn't contain the product. Only three - Iowa,
Nebraska and South Dakota - chose to order beef that may contain it.
The
uproar prompted Beef Products to suspend operations at plants in
Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kan.; and Waterloo, Iowa. Beef Products'
plants in Iowa and Kansas each produced about 350,000 pounds of lean,
finely textured beef per day, while the one in Texas produced about
200,000 pounds a day.
The company has won
support from the governors of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and South
Dakota. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also defended the
product, saying the federal government wouldn't allow the product if it
was unsafe.
The company has launched its own public relations offensive, including a website - www.beefisbeef.com - to advocate for the product.
Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
