Notre Dame’s Professor of Sesame Street Sues Student Journalists for ‘Defamation’
12th July 2023
Never trust a scholar of Sesame Street to know her legal terminology. Tamara Kay, a sociology professor at Notre Dame who studies the TV show’s cultural transfusion around the world, is suing conservative student publication the Rover for its coverage of her abortion activism.
Kay claims that two of its articles contained “defamatory and false statements.” The only trouble is that the Rover seems to be able to prove that what it published about Kay is true — and the paper has the receipts. Alas, another case of the decline of the American intellectual?
The feud between the two began in 2022 when the Rover published an article on Kay’s comments at an abortion panel. After the event, Rover editor-in-chief Joe DeReuil interviewed Kay with a recorder, an exchange which Kay denied happened after the article was published. Kay later told New York magazine’s the Cut that DeReuil did in fact introduce himself and ask her questions though “he did not say he was interviewing me.” But DeReuil sent National Review a recording of his conversation in which he identifies himself as the editor of the Rover before asking her questions.