ELK POINT, SD — A 12-member jury and four alternates, including 11 women and five men, are ready to hear opening arguments today in a $1.9 billion defamation trial scheduled to last eight weeks here at the Union County Court House.
Union County Courthouse in Elk Point, SD, is the location…
Given the BPI v. ABC trial starts this week, I thought it would be good to repost an Op-Ed I penned in April 2012.
What if you were the CEO of a multimillion dollar, privately held food manufacturing company and awoke one morning to find that the name of your best selling product (you…
ABC Broadcasting and on-air reporter Jim Avila are being ordered to face a Union County, SD jury over a $5.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Beef Products Inc. (BPI).
ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer, however, was released from the litigation over the Disney-owned network’s depiction…
I like a good trial as much as the next guy. Late last week, South Dakota Circuit Judge Cheryle Gering said she was not going to dismiss Beef Products Inc.’s $1.2-billion lawsuit against ABC News. 
For a moment at least, we can all have that fantasy about being in Elk Point, SD, someday in the…
Would Diane Sawyer hanging around tiny Elk Point, SD for a state Circuit Court trial be even more of a spectacle than in 1998 when Oprah Winfrey had to spent most of a week in the Texas cattle city of Amarillo? One thing for sure, Oprah got the “big” city, as Amarillo’s population was around…
By Helena Bottemiller and Gretchen Goetz By March of last year, lean finely textured beef (LFTB) had reached celebrity status under the unfavorable moniker “pink slime.” The product—which is made by centrifuging slightly heated fatty beef trimmings to separate out lean meat bits and then treating that meat with ammonia gas to reduce foodborne pathogens …
A former Beef Products Inc. employee has filed a civil lawsuit against a number of media sources, alleging that they “willfully and maliciously” spread false and misleading statements about BPI’s beef filler known as lean finely textured beef (LFTB), a product referred to as ‘pink slime’ by these sources. Those statements, the former employee claims,…
In the Spring of 2012, a beef product called “Lean Finely Textured Beef,” an ingredient in an estimated 70 percent of America’s ground beef, came under fire because the meat — which is pulled from a cow carcass after the main cuts of beef have been removed and separated from bones and tissue in a…
The most important food product disparagement case to come before Beef Products Inc. v. ABC was dropped into the “in” basket at South Dakota’s First Judicial District in Elk Point, SD. Like this latest case, Auvil v. CBS “60 Minutes” involved a food product being damaged by what was shown and said on television. In…
