By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
This article was updated at 7:35 p.m. Wednesday with comment from the plaintiff.
Two of Alaska’s largest news organizations and two top reporters did not commit defamation when they described a former state employee’s statements about rape, a state judge ruled on Tuesday in Anchorage.
Jeremy Cubas, a former aide to Gov. Mike Dunleavy, sued Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News, Nat Herz and Curtis Gilbert last year. American Public Media, a national organization, was also named in the suit.
Cubas resigned in 2023, shortly before the publication of an article that described comments he made in two podcast episodes. He filed suit almost two years later, seeking more than $5 million in damages and lost wages.
Cubas specifically challenged two parts of the article — a paraphrase that said Cubas “said it’s fine for a man to force himself on his wife” and the statement that Cubas “made comments about rape.”
In a 22-page order, Judge Christina Rankin said the second statement “is an accurate quote of Cubas’ own statement” in the podcast.
“Defendants used accurate, direct quotes from Cubas in the article. Therefore, Cubas can prove no set of facts that Statement Two is unfairly abridged, mischaracterized, distorted, or littered with slight inaccuracies,” Rankin said.
For the first statement, which was a paraphrase rather than a direct quote, Rankin concluded that it is “a fair abridgement” of Cubas’ words.
Cubas had argued that his belief that it is impossible to rape one’s wife — something he said during the two podcast episodes — is not the same as saying it is fine to “force yourself” on one’s wife.
Cubas’ core argument, Rankin concluded, was that the wording of the paraphrase was such that it implied Cubas believed it was OK for a spouse to “violently rape one’s own wife.”
“However, it is the alleged defamatory statement itself that the Court needs to review for truth, not the plaintiff’s inflamed version of the statements,” Rankin wrote.
She concluded that given the context given in the article, a reasonable reader would not share Cubas’ perceived implication but would instead “believe what defendants assert he said.”
Because Rankin concluded that the article is accurate, she did not take up Cubas’ other arguments, which included the idea that Cubas was not a public figure and that the reporters had malice against him.
“The court recognizes that this was good, solid journalism,” said Ed Ulman, president and CEO of Alaska Public Media. “The opinion lays things out thoroughly, but in the end it was simple. Truth is a defense in a libel case.”
By text message, Cubas said he will have more to say later.
“This case is in no way over. I’m working on the appeal,” he said.
