At 2:08 a.m., on Friday, December 29, 2006, the defendant received by e-mail the Lake in the Hills police department Daily Bulletin, and it reported that Carolene Eubanks had been charged with theft and obstruction of justice. As it normally does, the newspaper placed the information from the report in an article and then placed the article in line for publication in the upcoming issue of the newspaper. The article was eventually printed before 6 a.m. on January 2, 2007, and appeared in the defendant's newspaper on the same date. The Lake in the Hills police department had also sent a second e-mail on December 29, 2006, at 10:25 p.m., that said to remove the name of Carolene Eubanks and replace it with the name of Barbara Bradshaw. Because the employee who posted the article had already gone home and it was a long holiday weekend, no one was in when the second e-mail arrived, so it wasn't read until January 2, 2007, at 10:17 a.m. Consequently, the January 2, 2007, edition of the defendant's newspaper, printed before 6 a.m. on that date, published the article indicating that the plaintiff had been arrested and charged with theft and attempted obstruction of justice. The defendant published a retraction of the article in its January 3, 2007, newspaper, stating that the plaintiff was not the one charged with those crimes. On June 15, 2007, the plaintiff filed her complaint for defamation based on the January 2, 2007, publication.
The trial court granted the defendant's motion for summary judgment based on its exercise of a privilege. Plaintiff appealed. What privilege do you think the court relied on? What do you think the outcome of the appeal was and why? [Eubanks v. Northwest Herald Newspapers, 397 Ill.App.3d 746, 922 N.E.2d 1196 (2010).]