Dissenting Parents’ Defamation Claim Over School’s Allegations of Racism Can Go Forward

Some excerpts from the long Turpin v. Charlotte Latin Schools, Inc., decided today by the N.C. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Richard Dietz, joined by Chief Justice Paul Newby and Justices Philip Berger Jr., Tamara Barringer, and Trey Allen:

According to the complaint in this case, Plaintiffs Doug and Nicole Turpin sent their children to a private school called Charlotte Latin School. Beginning in the summer of 2020, the school began to change its curriculum to focus on politicized issues of race and gender identity. At some point, the Turpins learned that the school was teaching their sixth-grade child various polarizing concepts such as “Republicans are white supremacists.” The school also required young students to read books on sexuality and gender identity that were not age appropriate.

The Turpins started organizing with other parents to voice their concerns about the school curriculum in 2021. Eventually, the Turpins scheduled a meeting with school leadership. At the meeting, the school was not interested in discussing the Turpins’ concerns. Instead, the school terminated the Turpins’ enrollment contracts and expelled their children with no advance warning.

Among other things, the Turpins sued the school for defamation, and the court allowed the case to go forward:

The Turpins allege that Charlotte Latin and Baldecchi made false statements [to third parties] about the contents of the [Turpins’] PowerPoint presentation [that the Turpins delivered at the meeting]—specifically, that the PowerPoint contained the racist assertion that minority students and faculty at the school “have not earned their positions and honors” and that those minority students and faculty were “not up to the merit of the school” like the white students and faculty ….

The defamatory statements by Charlotte Latin do not accurately characterize the “gist” or “sting” of the PowerPoint discussion. First, the only portion of the presentation referencing how the school’s approach “erodes the quality of student” and the “quality of teacher” expressly addresses all students and faculty, regardless of color. That section of the presentation asserted that the excessive focus on “DEI and Critical Theory” was shifting the school away from a classical education teaching “objectivity,” “science,” “canonical reading,” and so on, to instead embrace a “political and ideological agenda.”

When a school that was long focused on the importance of a classical education instead shifts toward a partisan, politicized curriculum, as the PowerPoint claimed, that shift impacts every student and every teacher equally. Nothing in these statements suggests the school’s changed curriculum or ideological agenda negatively impacted minority students and faculty but not their white counterparts.

The remaining portions of the PowerPoint examined by the Court of Appeals are critiques of non-merit-based hiring or admissions practices and a pitch to return to a “meritocracy.” Importantly, none of these statements refer to the quality or merit of particular students or groups of students. The statements simply assert that the school should commit to a meritocracy where the driving goal is “academic excellence.”

Were we to adopt the Court of Appeals’ reasoning with respect to these statements, it would mean any statement criticizing non-merit-based hiring or admissions practices is, as a matter of law, a statement that people who benefited from those practices would not otherwise qualify based on merit. This is a fallacy. Someone who benefits from a non-merit-based factor can still be qualified based on merit alone. The presence of that additional factor says nothing about the merit-based qualifications of the candidate.

Simply put, criticizing so-called “DEI goals” or other race-conscious criteria in hiring and admissions, and urging a return to a “meritocracy,” is not the equivalent of claiming that minority students and faculty have not earned their positions and honors or are not up to the merit of other students. We do not agree that “the gist” or “the sting” of these two categories of comments are the same as a matter of law. The latter—statements focused on the purported inferiority of minority students or faculty—are pernicious and racist. They are the sort of offensive statements that, if heard by others, can damage one’s reputation and good name. Accordingly, in appropriate contexts, claiming that someone made this kind of offensive statement when they did not can be defamatory. Taking as true all the allegations in the complaint, this is one of those cases….

The school did not make a subjective statement of opinion such as “the Turpins are racists.” The school told its entire community of students, parents, and faculty that the Turpins said a specific racist thing. That claim has an objective answer: the Turpins either said it or they didn’t. The correct analogy is not claiming someone is a racist, as in the cases the dissent cites, but claiming someone used a racial epithet. If that is a lie, it is defamatory.

As we have done with respect to other factual allegations in this divisive case, we again point out that there may be more going on factually than what is alleged in the complaint. For example, we do not yet know what the presenters said as they displayed the PowerPoint document. At this stage of the case, we can look only at the document itself. Both the school’s email and Baldecchi’s statements may, in full context, have been addressing matters beyond the PowerPoint document.

Courts cannot seek out this sort of full context at the pleadings stage. That is the purpose of fact discovery. At this early stage of the case, we take the allegations in the complaint as true and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the Turpins. Doing so here, the Turpins have sufficiently alleged that defendants made materially false statements. We therefore reject the reasoning of the Court of Appeals with respect to falsity….

Justice Allison Riggs, joined by Justice Anita Earls, dissented with regard to this; an excerpt:

[A]llegations of racism, like many subjective viewpoints, are in the eye of the beholder and do not squarely fit into the falsity test. How could a plaintiff prove that a statement alleging he expressed a particular viewpoint is false? How can a defendant prove that it is true? … “… [M]any courts in other jurisdictions that have faced the issue of defamation claims based on accusations of bigotry or racism have held the statements to be nonactionable statements of opinion.” …

The majority fails to analyze whether the alleged defamatory statement is a fact, which can be false, or an opinion, which cannot. Charlotte Latin’s email, about which the Turpins complain and that they infer is made in reference to them, states that parents complained “that diverse students and faculty have not earned their positions and honors at Latin and that diversity comes at the expense of excellence.”

It is a faulty equivalence to suggest this actual statement, a reflection of values and opinion that the school rejected, is more like “claiming someone used a racial epithet” than “claiming someone is a racist.” Instead, the crux of the Turpins’ defamation claim is that Charlotte Latin, in characterizing the Refocus Latin presentation, portrayed them in a negative light. This is an entirely subjective inference, which does not lend itself to the falsity analysis. Even with the low notice pleading standard, the Turpins must state a legally cognizable claim—which they cannot do if the alleged defamatory statement is an opinion incapable of falsity.

As a matter of law, allegations of racism should be treated as unprovable opinion, not fact, as they are in other jurisdictions. See, e.g., Stevens v. Tilman (7th Cir. 1988) (holding that an allegation of racism “is not actionable unless it implies the existence of undisclosed, defamatory facts”); Murphy v. Rosen (Conn. 2025) (joining “numerous other jurisdictions” to hold that an allegation a person was a “white supremacist” was “not objectively verifiable” so was a non-actionable opinion); Cousins v. Goodier (Del. 2022) (holding that an allegation of racism was not “provably false” and that “the First Amendment is clear that [determining what it means to be racist] would be the opposite of our role”)…. I fear this superficial treatment of the limitations on the use of state defamation law to constrain free speech will have significant chilling effects on important public discourse and will fling open the courthouse doors to disputes that should be settled in open, public conversations, not by judges….

The court also allowed parents’ separate breach of contract and fraud claims to go forward.