Aqua
09-12-2007, 02:57 PM
(SF)
How bad could it be if some of your old classmates wrongly thought you were gay? Maybe a bit annoying, you'd think. Slightly embarrassing, perhaps. Probably quite funny. But $1.5million worth of bad?
Two American men are suing their old university for £739,000 ($1.5million), after it wrongly printed an announcement that they'd become married 'life partners' in its newsletter.
After apparently falling victim to a prank, the quarterly magazine from American University in Washington D.C. wrongly said that 28-year-old Brett Royce and Ross Weil, 29, had got hitched in a ceremony in Boston last June. It claimed that Weil was leading figure in the 'Gay Rights Brigade', a non-existent organisation.
Now, Weil and Royce, who totally aren't gay, are suing their alma mater, claiming that it acted maliciously and with gross negligence, for example by not checking with them whether or not they'd had a gay wedding.
The lawsuit states that the deeply heterosexual Royce and Weil have been harmed by the false marriage allegation - although they insist that really, there's nothing wrong with being gay. It's just they aren't gay. Not gay. Hetero. Okay?
'It has nothing to do with homophobia,' their lawyer Michael Kaufman told the New York Post.
How bad could it be if some of your old classmates wrongly thought you were gay? Maybe a bit annoying, you'd think. Slightly embarrassing, perhaps. Probably quite funny. But $1.5million worth of bad?
Two American men are suing their old university for £739,000 ($1.5million), after it wrongly printed an announcement that they'd become married 'life partners' in its newsletter.
After apparently falling victim to a prank, the quarterly magazine from American University in Washington D.C. wrongly said that 28-year-old Brett Royce and Ross Weil, 29, had got hitched in a ceremony in Boston last June. It claimed that Weil was leading figure in the 'Gay Rights Brigade', a non-existent organisation.
Now, Weil and Royce, who totally aren't gay, are suing their alma mater, claiming that it acted maliciously and with gross negligence, for example by not checking with them whether or not they'd had a gay wedding.
The lawsuit states that the deeply heterosexual Royce and Weil have been harmed by the false marriage allegation - although they insist that really, there's nothing wrong with being gay. It's just they aren't gay. Not gay. Hetero. Okay?
'It has nothing to do with homophobia,' their lawyer Michael Kaufman told the New York Post.