Libel Trial a Spicy Blend of the Law, Freud and Sex : Courts: Spat between writer and the subject of her blistering article focuses on journalistic betrayal.

By JENIFER WARREN

May 14, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO — When the journalist came calling 10 years ago, the psychoanalyst was good and ready to talk. Jeffrey M. Masson had lost his job for espousing renegade views on Sigmund Freud, and was quite eager to air a retort.

He bared his soul through 40 hours of interviews, and Janet Malcolm listened, tape recorder at hand. Then she wrote a stinging pair of stories for the New Yorker, portraying Masson--who had hoped for redemption--as an egomaniacal sex fiend.

This week the two sit on opposite sides of a San Francisco courtroom, dueling over a $10-million libel lawsuit Masson filed against Malcolm and the renowned magazine that published her work.

With its themes of betrayal, sex and journalistic intrigue, Masson vs. Malcolm is a spicy show, drawing a standing-room-only crowd of therapists, journalists and assorted tweed-clad intellectuals. The voyeurs are attracted, in part, by the principals--he, a rakish psychoanalyst who dazzled and then disappointed his peers, she a queen bee in the New Yorker’s hive of gifted writers.

Testifying first, Masson charged that Malcolm invented five quotations to enrich her devastating portrait of him. Malcolm, who took her turn on the stand Thursday, insists he is suffering a sort of buyer’s remorse--regretting unflattering phrases that he did in fact say.

The dispute has bounced about the courts, and was even dismissed twice. But in a landmark decision in 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Masson’s suit--and established a new test that he and other public figures who allege libel must meet to prove their case.

Now the celebrated spat has finally landed before a U.S. District Court jury. The trial will not break legal ground, but one scholar in the gallery, University of California law professor Stephen Barnett, calls it “an irresistible combination of law, journalism, psychoanalysis, sex and arresting personalities.”

The case also offers some delicious ironies, the juiciest of which concerns Malcolm’s condemnation of her own profession in a 1990 book dissecting author Joe McGinniss’ book about murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. In an attack strangely similar to some of Masson’s complaints, Malcolm accused “every journalist” of “preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and then betraying them without remorse.”

It is the jury’s job to sift through the facts and bluster and answer the essential question in the case: Did Malcolm deliberately fabricate five quotations, damaging Masson’s reputation as a result? To win under the Supreme Court’s new rule, Masson must show not only that he was misquoted, but also that the inaccuracies fostered a “material change in meaning” that specifically caused him harm.

Because the trial is likely to center on the two principals’ credibility, it was not surprising that each of the warring lawyers sought in the trial’s opening moments to trumpet his client as the credible one.

Masson (pronounced MAY-son) is “a brilliant man,” said his attorney, Charles Morgan Jr., one whose career was ruined by a writer who “put statements in his mouth” and twisted those he did say.

Au contraire, argued Malcolm’s attorney, Gary L. Bostwick, who portrayed his client as a painstaking person who has been falsely accused by a chronic complainer with a faulty memory.

There are some facts on which both sides agree, among them that Masson, 52, and Malcolm, 58, initially met thanks to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Masson’s interest in Freud surfaced in the 1970s, when he traded his life as a professor of Sanskrit for that of a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis had intrigued him, Masson testified this week, since his days as a student at Harvard University, where his disturbing tendency to sleep with every woman he met drove him to seek professional counseling.

By 1980, Masson had won an appointment as curator of the Freud Archives--a prestigious post that made him custodian of Freud’s research, letters and other documents. Soon after, however, Masson uncovered evidence that soured his view of Freud. Ultimately, he concluded that peer pressure had pushed Freud to abandon his famous seduction theory, which linked certain adult neuroses with childhood sexual abuse.

Masson’s conclusion made him an instant heretic in the psychoanalytic community--and cost him his job at the Freud Archives. It also made him of interest to Malcolm, who had read of his dizzying rise and fall and suspected it would yield a compelling tale.

She was right, and when her 48,500-word articles appeared in the New Yorker in December, 1983, Masson sued. Initially, he challenged a large bundle of quotations as either fabricated or altered in a damaging way. But court rulings have whittled the number at issue to five.

In perhaps the most controversial of the passages, Masson is quoted as saying that officials of the Freud Archives regarded him as “an intellectual gigolo.” A second quotes him saying he planned to turn the house of Freud’s daughter, Anna--a repository for some of the archives--into a place of “sex, women, fun.” And a third contains Masson’s boast that, after Freud, he would be remembered as “the greatest analyst who ever lived.”

Only one of the disputed statements is captured on the tape recordings Malcolm made during seven months of exhaustive interviews. Three other quotes, the journalist says, were scribbled on scraps of paper when her tape recorder was broken. The scraps were discarded, Malcolm said, after she transcribed the notes onto typewritten pages. As for the fifth quotation, Malcolm said she remembered it.

In court this week, Masson hotly denied saying the quoted material that he argues has made him the laughingstock of his profession.

Further challenging Malcolm’s accuracy, Masson testified that the writer erred in describing the lunch they shared during one interview at the fashionable Chez Panisse cafe in Berkeley, where he lived at the time.

Malcolm wrote that Masson ate “striped bass with fennel” and took “appreciative bites” of a “baked goat cheese appetizer.” But Masson--in one of numerous lines that drew chuckles in court--testified that he does not eat fish and is no fan of goat cheese.

On Tuesday, Malcolm’s lawyer struck back, subjecting Masson to a withering cross-examination in an effort to prove the attorney’s assertion that Masson “doesn’t know from one day to the next what he said.” Using charts and muffled tape recordings of Malcolm’s interviews, Bostwick showed that Masson did say statements he had once denied.

Although these quotations are not among the five in dispute in the libel trial, Bostwick bets that the numerous inconsistencies will cast doubt on Masson’s central claim--that he remembers vividly what he did and did not say to Malcolm.

On Thursday, Malcolm took the witness stand and accused Masson of lying and making terrible accusations during his three days of testimony. She changes quotes only to correct errors and smooth syntax, Malcolm testified.

But under questioning by Masson’s attorney, she also admitted to an unorthodox practice of plucking comments from several interviews conducted at different times and stitching them together into one lengthy monologue.

In her article on Masson, for example, Malcolm conceded that she took comments he made to her over a period of months and merged them into one long soliloquy, which included the “sex, women, fun” quote.

“You reported that the entire statement was made by Mr. Masson at a lunch at Chez Panisse (and) that’s not true, is it?” Morgan asked Malcolm.

After a pause, she answered: “That’s right.”

Later, Malcolm called the practice “compression” and testified that although some writers at the New Yorker are “freaked out” by it, she sees no problem “if you don’t change the meaning of what is discussed.”

The trial is expected to last another three weeks.

Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this article.