Dorothy Sucher

Dorothy Sucher (May 18, 1933 – August 22, 2010) was an American author and psychotherapist who worked as a reporter at the Greenbelt News Review, where an article that she wrote that quoted critics of a developers calling his plans "blackmail" initially resulted in a $17,500 judgement against the paper. The U.S. Supreme Court would later overturn the lower court verdict, ruling in Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Assn. v. Bresler that the use of "rhetorical hyperbole" in such cases is covered by the First Amendment, a major victory that supported Freedom of the press in the United States.

She was born Dorothy Glassman on May 18, 1933, in Brooklyn, where she majored in English at Brooklyn College, graduating magna cum laude in 1954. She would later earn a master's degree in 1975 from Johns Hopkins University in mental health.

Supreme Court case

Sucher worked as a reporter earning $5 a week for the Greenbelt News Review of Greenbelt, Maryland from 1959 to 1970, filling in as a columnist and associate editor. In that capacity she covered a 1965 city council hearing where developer Charles S. Bresler offered to sell a property the city wanted to acquire as long as he received the variances he was seeking on a development project, a deal that was described by members of the public attending the meeting as "blackmail", and Sucher reported these comments in her article on the meeting. In 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8–0 to overturn the lower court ruling, finding that "even the most careless reader must have perceived that the word was no more than rhetorical hyperbole", that "It is simply impossible to believe that a reader who reached the word 'blackmail' in either article would not have understood exactly what was meant" and that no reader would have interpreted the word in question to mean that Bresler had committed the criminal offense. To have ruled otherwise "would subvert the most fundamental meaning of a free press". She served in 1978 as state coordinator for the National Organization for Women (NOW), as part of her longstanding advocacy in support of women's rights. In the Northern Prince George's County Chapter of NOW, Sucher established and led the Consciousness Raising Program (1977-1980). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

Sucher taught creative writing at Georgetown University, Duke University, and the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

A resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, Sucher died at age 77 on August 22, 2010, at her home there due to thyroid cancer. She was survived by her husband Joseph, as well as by two sons and a granddaughter.