The Woes of Confidential

In a rare access of virtue, Confidential came out last week with the second editorial irt its five-year history. Its aim: to persuade readers that "a determined effort by a segment of the motion picture industry to 'get' this magazine" was responsible for a Los Angeles indictment charging Confidential with criminal libel and three other counts (TIME, June 24). Invoking God, the Stars and Stripes and "the world's largest newsstand sale,"* Scandal-mag Publisher Robert Harrison declaimed: "We believe that the truths we have published have been in the best traditions of American journalism."

Unconvinced, U.S. District Judge Harry C. Westover threw out of his Los Angeles court last week a $3,000,000 countersuit by Harrison charging California's attorney general with suppression and censorship for warning dealers and distributors that they might be prosecuted for handling Confidential and its gutter-sister Whisper. And in the first libel suit that has yet included Confidential's 3,000 California distributors as well as the magazine, Screen Star Maureen (The Quiet Man) O'Hara asked for $1,000,000 in damages for a March story that claimed she once picked row 35 of Hollywood's Grauman theater for an off-screen amour.

* Incorrect. Soaring TV Guide sells more than 4,000,000 weekly on newsstands, whereas slipping Confidential claimed "more than 3,000,000" bimonthly.

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