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Jury task: Did words go too far? By VICKI GUARINO Two Jacksonville businessmen are replaying their long-running spate of name-calling for a Jackson County court jury this week, blow by insulting blow. They're asking jurors to decide whether the war of words went too far. Newspaper publisher Woody Hunter says it did. He wants $450,000 for suffering caused by the feud with Don Wendt, who published the Nugget newspaper and sat on the Jacksonville City Council, and Wendt's wife, Clara, once the town's mayor. The trial could conclude today. At the heart of the courtroom battle are comments by Wendt that Hunter contends label him a child molester. Wendt denied ever calling Hunter a child molester. In testimony Tuesday, Wendt said he referred only to Hunter's "problems in Vermont" in conversations around town. The "problems" relate to when Hunter published a weekly newspaper in Vermont in the '80s. There, Hunter became embroiled in a child-abuse investigation. He sued the town for conducting a bogus investigation and attempting to entrap him. The town paid Hunter to settle the case, and Hunter came to Jacksonville where he began publishing the Jacksonville Review Monthly. Soon Hunter and Wendt were at war. Wendt complained to jurors that Hunter's tirade against him in the Review was unremitting and unfair. He described various disputes, cartoons that ridiculed him and allegations that were thoroughly fabricated. Wendt insisted that he couldn't talk to Hunter directly, so during the 1997 Christmas shopping season, he crafted a display in the window of his Jacksonville shop: a diminutive red-clad, gilded-legged, smiling Christmas elf bearing a business-card size sign reading "`Woody Hunter, please stop `molesting' me." "It has nothing to do with a child or molesting," Wendt told jurors. He said he used the word "molest" in the sense that he wanted Hunter to stop badgering and harassing him. "I never had the chance to respond," Wendt testified. Hunter contends that the sign amounts to libel, and that Wendt conversations about him around town amount to slander. The dispute arrived in court last summer, with a $700,000 libel suit by the Wendts. Don Wendt complained that an editorial published by Hunter in February 1998 -- just after the elf episode -- questioned Wendt's ethics. Hunter responded with a countersuit for libel and slander. Judge Phil Arnold tossed out most of the Wendts' case, declaring the couple public figures. State law prohibits public officials from winning defamation claims unless they can prove malice and knowledge that the information was false. A single remaining allegation by the Wendts, that Hunter failed to properly register his business, will be decided by Arnold. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA