Former columnist Stu Bykofsky wins his defamation suit against Inquirer writer

Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron defamed former Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky when she described him at a retirement send-off as having “a taste for child prostitutes,” a jury found Wednesday.

Bykofsky sued Saffron and The Inquirer’s parent company after the 2019 event, saying she had completely distorted a column he wrote about the sex trade in Thailand. Saffron told jurors her words were an “accurate, short-hand take” on Bykofsky’s article.

After about five hours of deliberation, the 12-member jury found both Saffron and The Inquirer’s parent company liable for defaming Bykofsky. It ordered them to pay him $45,000 in compensatory damages for his emotional distress and embarrassment, but found they owed him nothing for any harm to his reputation or earning power.

The jury imposed a further penalty against Saffron alone, saying she owed Bykofsky $1,000 in punitive damages.

“I feel my good name has been restored,” Bykofsky said after the verdict. He added: “The people who applauded Ms. Saffron as a truth-teller must now feel very foolish indeed.”

The Inquirer parent company said through a lawyer that it was evaluating whether to appeal. Saffron declined comment.

During the five-day trial, Saffron testified that she regretted speaking out at that time and place, but said she stood by her criticism of Bykofsky, who worked for the Daily News for more than 40 years as a television critic, gossip columnist, and metro columnist. His opinion pieces began appearing in The Inquirer after the papers merged staffs in 2016.

When Bykofsky, now 81, retired in 2019, Saffron criticized him and his work at the newsroom retirement gathering, highlighting a 2011 column in which he wrote about visiting an old friend in Thailand who he wrote had moved there in part for the “low-cost, no-guilt sex.”

In the column, which was controversial when published and later, Bykofsky told readers about the bar “girls” available “to go” in Thailand, who he said charged up to $100 for sex. He also wrote about watching a grandfatherly foreigner escort a “young woman” in a scene that seemed as if they were headed to a Toys R Us store — but actually reflected a sexual transaction. The scene, he wrote, made him “feel bad.”

“Prostitution is terrible,” Bykofsky wrote. “Poverty may be worse.”

At the newsroom send-off, Saffron, 65, told those gathered that the column was “infamous” and revealed Bykofsky’s “taste for child prostitutes” — the phrase that the judge in the defamation case said was at the root of Bykofsky’s suit against The Inquirer’s parent company and Saffron, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for criticism.

In his more than three hours of testimony, Bykofsky said Saffron’s words made him “so angry I can barely contain myself.”

In almost two hours on the stand, Saffron testified that she had not meant to imply that Bykofsky had had sex with underage girls, but said the column amounted to a “how-to primer on how to hire a prostitute in Thailand.” His claim about feeling “bad” rang false, she said.

To undermine Bykofsky, Michael Schwartz and Eli Segal, the lawyers for Saffron and The Inquirer, drew upon his pretrial deposition and emails that he exchanged with his friend in Thailand after the trip, using the company email system. As a result, Bykofsky acknowledged before the trial that he had paid a woman for sex while he was in Thailand.

Common Pleas Court Judge Glynnis D. Hill, who presided over the trial, barred the lawyers from revealing explicitly to the jurors that Bykofsky had hired a prostitute, but permitted the panel to learn that, in emails, he had later joked that a sex worker was “too old for me now,” but said, “Maybe her daughter is working.”

Schwartz and Segal also stressed to the jurors that it was Bykofsky who provided video of the newsroom confrontation, taken by his girlfriend, to Philadelphia Magazine. The magazine posted it and the dispute went viral. Bykofsky said he was a computer novice and had given the video to a reporter to help him get the story right, not realizing it would be made public.

“Mr. Bykofsky wanted to have that video made public because he thought it would make Ms. Saffron look bad,” Schwartz said in his closing argument. “What he did not think about was providing the video to Philadelphia Magazine would make him look bad.”

The two lawyers also dismissed the idea that Saffron’s remarks had delivered a new blow to Bykofsky’s reputation, citing numerous emails in which he acknowledged the Thailand column was highly controversial years before Saffron spoke out.

After Bykofsky filed his defamation suit, the parent company of The Inquirer countersued, saying his criticism of the newspaper violated a nondisparagement clause he agreed to as part of a buyout package he reached when he retired. That suit is pending.

In some ways, the dispute between the critic and the columnist seemed a classic clash of cultures after a business merger — one pitting Saffron, a former Moscow correspondent for The Inquirer and author of books on caviar and Philadelphia architecture, against Bykofsky, who began his career in 1959 as a copyboy for the long-defunct New York World-Telegram who went on to write a blunt Daily News column that reflected the tabloid’s feisty image.

This gap was played up by Mark Schwartz, who led Bykofsky’s legal team with attorney Jason Pearlman. “You have a pretty elitist view of the world, don’t you?” he asked Saffron at one point. She rejected that characterization.

In an email shown to the jury, Bykofsky joked that some Inquirer staffers were appalled that his writing was appearing in their broadsheet. They were upset, he said, because they believed that a “retrograde, racist, imperialist and misogynistic thug was among them.”

At his departure ceremony, held in what had been The Inquirer’s newsroom, most of those who feted him were former Daily News journalists. And at the ceremony’s close, Bykofsky said he had been forced out of his column. “I don’t belong in this place,” he said, referring to the newsroom. “This isn’t my place.”

As for Saffron, her testimony made it plain how weary she was of the entire dispute.

“I will say with the passage of time,” she said, “it all seems so petty.”