Performance Enhancement Company Sues MLB for Defamation But Loses | SPORTS LAW UPDATE

Performance Enhancement Company Sues MLB for Defamation But Loses  -- Truth is Defense.  Game Over

This week’s case involves a company that supplied athletes with a powerful banned performance supplement called IGF-1. (Here is a 3-minute Youtube video explaining how IGF-1 works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bjjIPs3Es0).

Neiman Nix, a former  Major League pitcher who ran a clinic called DNA Sports Lab in South Beach, sued MLB, again, accusing MLB of killing his business and hacking his accounts because it suspected him of running a shadow operation similar to Biogenesis.

The complaint claims that the media reported on this lawsuit and published a news article that stated that Nix and his company admitted to selling products that used “bioidentical insulin-like growth factor” which is derived from elk antlers, a substance that they claimed was banned by Major League Baseball. The complaint says that the MLB used the article in prior litigation. It also states that Major League Baseball is also supporting ESPN’s defamatory publication due to its multi-billion dollar broadcasting contract.

Nix claims that MLB portrayed him and his company as marketing and selling prohibited performance-enhancing substances, and damaged his business and professional integrity. The court nixed the lawsuit stating that DNA Sports’s products did, in fact, contain IGF-1 and that IGF-1 is a banned substance. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Case dismissed.

Here is the case: http://www.courts.state.ny.us/reporter/pdfs/2018/2018_31141.pdf