A perennial Arlington County Board candidate’s lawsuit against The Washington Post has been dismissed.
A district court judge in D.C. threw out Audrey Clement’s suit — which alleged age discrimination and defamation — following oral arguments this week, court records show.
Clement told ARLnow that the court’s decision was “all but a foregone conclusion” but she plans to appeal.
The lawsuit concerned a candidate questionnaire that the Post ran in October 2021.
Clement reported on the questionnaire that she was 52 years old, but a review of government records indicated she was actually 72, according to the Post. The newspaper ran a correction and a follow-up story about the discrepancy.
In a civil complaint filed pro se in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in February, Clement argued that the Post’s questionnaire and subsequent reporting violated the Age Discrimination Act of 1975. This prohibits age discrimination “in programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance.”
“The candidate form rejected any entry but a positive number, and it would not submit when I left the field blank,” she wrote. “In this way the Post compelled me to report protected information or forfeit the opportunity to extend my candidate outreach effort to a wider audience.”
In a motion to dismiss, the Post claimed that Clement never disputed the accuracy of the newspaper’s reporting and never sought a correction — saying only that she had “achieved the age of 52” in response to follow-up questions.
Additionally, the newspaper — which reportedly found Clement’s true date of birth in voter registration records and a traffic ticket — argued that reporting factual information does not constitute defamation and that candidates aren’t “compelled” to answer a voluntary questionnaire.
Moreover, the Post asserted, Clement failed to show how the privately owned newspaper would be subject to the 1975 Age Discrimination Act to begin with.
The court agreed on this last point, Clement told ARLnow — finding that “procurement contracts of the type [the Post] negotiates with the federal government do not constitute federal assistance.”
This means the newspaper is, indeed, not governed by the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, the court found.
“I take comfort from the fact that I enjoy a lot of company among other candidates for public office, most of whom are over the age of 40,” Clement said. “This decision not only undermines their rights but those of countless other Americans, whose right to withhold their age from institutions that don’t have a need to know has been read out of the Age Discrimination Act of 1975.”
The Post declined to comment on this story.
Scott McCaffrey contributed to this report
