A federal jury sided Wednesday with novelist Nicholas Sparks and the private Christian school he founded in his North Carolina hometown, dismissing claims by the school's former headmaster that he was unjustly fired and then slandered by the author.
Jurors spent about three hours before deciding that the author of "Message in a Bottle" and "The Notebook," the novelist's foundation and Epiphany School of Global Studies owed nothing to Saul Hillel Benjamin.
Benjamin sued in 2014, contending he was fired without cause, then defamed when Sparks told a job recruiter, school trustees and others that Benjamin suffered from mental illness.