The North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the Turpin Charlotte Latin defamation claim may proceed to discovery, reversing the Court of Appeals and holding that the school’s characterisation of a parents’ PowerPoint presentation as racist is, at this pleadings stage, a materially false statement of fact rather than a non-actionable opinion.
The majority opinion, authored by Justice Richard Dietz and joined by four colleagues including Chief Justice Paul Newby, was handed down following oral arguments heard on 29 October 2025. Doug and Nicole Turpin filed the underlying lawsuit in 2022, alleging that school leaders had engaged in what they characterised as cancel culture against their beliefs after they organised parental opposition to Charlotte Latin School’s curriculum changes.
The Defamation Claim in Turpin v. Charlotte Latin
According to the complaint, the Turpins began organising with other parents in 2021 under a group called Refocus Latin, which delivered a PowerPoint presentation to the school’s board of trustees. Charlotte Latin had encouraged Refocus Latin to bring future concerns to the school, yet at the meeting the school terminated the Turpins’ enrolment contracts and expelled their children without advance warning.
The school subsequently communicated to its wider community that the Turpins’ presentation had asserted that minority students and faculty ‘have not earned their positions and honors’ and were ‘not up to the merit of the school.’ The Turpins denied that the presentation contained any such claim.
The majority accepted that denial, at least for pleadings purposes. The court found that the relevant sections of the PowerPoint addressed all students and faculty regardless of race, criticising an excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as shifting the school away from classical education towards a ‘political and ideological agenda.’ The majority held that criticising non-merit-based hiring or admissions practices is not, as a matter of law, equivalent to claiming that minority individuals lack the qualifications to have earned their positions. ‘Someone who benefits from a non-merit-based factor can still be qualified based on merit alone,’ the court stated. ‘The presence of that additional factor says nothing about the merit-based qualifications of the candidate.’
The court drew a sharp analogy: ‘The school did not make a subjective statement of opinion such as “the Turpins are racists.” The school told its entire community of students, parents, and faculty that the Turpins said a specific racist thing. That claim has an objective answer: the Turpins either said it or they didn’t. The correct analogy is not claiming someone is a racist… but claiming someone used a racial epithet. If that is a lie, it is defamatory.’
The majority was careful to note the limits of its ruling. Courts at the pleadings stage can only assess the document itself; oral remarks made during the presentation, or wider context beyond the PowerPoint, remain to be tested in fact discovery. Headmaster Baldecchi’s conduct in the aftermath was already a matter of concern: according to the Carolina Journal, Baldecchi had railed against the presentation to faculty and staff, calling the Turpins’ views abhorrent and describing the endeavour as a lost cause.
The Dissent: Racism Allegations as Opinion, Not Fact
Justices Allison Riggs and Anita Earls dissented on the defamation point. Justice Riggs argued that allegations of racism are, in the eyes of many courts and by their nature, unprovable matters of opinion rather than falsifiable statements of fact. She cited a line of authority from other jurisdictions, including Stevens v. Tilman (7th Cir. 1988), Murphy v. Rosen (Conn. 2025), and Cousins v. Goodier (Del. 2022), each of which treated racism allegations as non-actionable opinion.
The dissent’s core concern was structural. Justice Riggs warned that allowing such claims to proceed would have ‘significant chilling effects on important public discourse’ and would route disputes into litigation that ought to be resolved through open public conversation. She also challenged the majority’s fact-versus-opinion analysis, arguing that the school’s email, which described parents as complaining that diverse students ‘have not earned their positions,’ was itself a reflection of contested values rather than a verifiable factual assertion.
The majority did not persuade the dissenters that its racial-epithet analogy was apt. Justice Riggs characterised the Turpins’ core complaint as one of being portrayed in a negative light, an inherently subjective inference, she argued, that does not lend itself to a falsity analysis.
Beyond defamation, the court also allowed the Turpins’ separate breach of contract and fraud claims to advance. The NC Chamber’s legal commentary has described the court’s handling of the pleadings questions in this case as potentially signalling a sea change in North Carolina’s Rule 12(b)(6) jurisprudence. A motion to dismiss nine claims, including fraud, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and negligent misrepresentation, was filed in the Court of Appeals proceedings on 2 April 2024; the extent to which those claims survive into discovery will be the next inflection point for the litigation.
