This sounds like an interesting story and piece of privacy law history.
In 1943 Zelma Cason filed a ground-breaking lawsuit against Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Yearling) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Cason claimed Rawlings had invaded her ‘right to privacy’ in the author’s recently published book, Cross Creek. The suit – the first of its kind ever filed in Florida – used ‘the right of privacy defense’. At that time the state didn’t even recognize the existence of that right.
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The landmark case began when Cason, one of Rawlings’ closest friends took issue with the author’s description of her in Cross Creek as “…an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as much of the village and country as needs management or will submit to it. I cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother …” An additional real-life dramatic element was added to the mix in that Cason was represented by Kate Walton – one of Florida’s first female lawyers – in a time when women were not even allowed to serve on juries in Florida.
Read more on BroadwayWorld.com. And if you go see the play, let me know how it was.