A man in his 70s awoke one morning a few years ago to find that his local paper in Idaho had printed a story that mentioned him. There, printed on the front page, was a copy of a witness statement indicating that the man, Fred U., had a gay affair with his teenage male cousin — in 1956, when he was also a teen.

Not since Tom Hanks outed his drama teacher on national TV has there been a case as strange as this one.

Fred U. sued the Idaho paper for, among other things, defamation and invasion of his privacy. But after six years of litigation, the Supreme Court of Idaho ruled the First Amendment insulates the media from liability for reporting the contents of public court records — even if the records are 40 years old.

In 1995, The Statesman published a story entitled “The Boy Most Likely.” The story dealt with events in Boise in 1955-56, where charges surfaced concerning grown men propositioning young men at the YMCA.

Police interviewed 1,500 people and arrested 16 suspects. The events became national news (a 1966 book by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise, chronicles the events).

Gerassi’s book notes that, while hundreds of men — many married, wealthy and politically powerful — were suspects, the police charged only a handful of men with sodomy. They were mostly single, poor and not connected to the local power structure.

The practice of male prostitution had been going on at the Boise YMCA for 10 years before the 1955 arrests. It involved as many as 125 young men, with some as young as 16, but most 18 and older.

One of the few men arrested in 1955 was Melvin Dir, a theatre designer who had moved from Boise to San Francisco. Police suspected that Dir may have had sex with Frank Jones, the son of a Boise City Councilmember.

In high school, classmates described Jones as handsome, athletically gifted, bright, and the boy voted “most likely to” succeed (he was a cadet at West Point when police charged Dir in 1956). Dir eventually confessed to the charge of sodomy with Jones.

When police interviewed Jones at West Point and explained Dir had named him, the young man admitted on tape that he received oral sex from Dir, though he said Dir forced him to receive fellatio at gunpoint.

Dir denied he used force, convincing police he was telling the truth by providing a handwritten statement to police, in which he wrote: “Afterwards we [Dir and Frank] talked about gay affairs that he [Frank Jones] had had with (both) [a classmate] and his cousin Fred U.”

As a result of the charges, West Point expelled Jones from school, while Dir got a relatively minor sentence. And Fred U. never knew about the note until 1995, when the paper published it on its front page as part of a 40-year anniversary of the scandal.

However, in doing its story, the paper printed a photo of the Dir statement with Fred U.’s name. Fred U. was then reportedly harassed by people thinking he had a gay affair.

The court disposed Fred U.’s defamation charge because the First Amendment allows newspapers to fairly report the contents of court documents, regardless of whether the contents are true or not.

More troubling for the court was an invasion of privacy claim, which alleged that the paper had disclosed “old, private and embarrassing facts.”

In previous cases, courts have ruled that the media could be liable for publishing private, embarrassing and old facts about someone. This even included publishing old criminal convictions.

The California Supreme Court, for example, had ruled that the law should allow criminals to “rehabilitate” themselves without fear that a newspaper will dredge up past convictions and humiliate them.

But the Idaho Supreme Court said the latest cases suggest anyone can re-publish anything in a court file.

In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a newspaper was immune from liability when the paper published the name of a minor rape victim, after a reporter found the victim’s name in public court records. The Supreme Court ruled that a state could not impose liability on the media for merely reporting on the contents of public court documents.

Though attorneys frequently request that a court seal records to protect the privacy of the parties, that doesn’t help people like Fred U., as court records often contain defamatory data about someone. It’s absurd to expect anyone, especially a minor, to search court documents to see if there are hearsay charges in a court file, and then make a motion for a court to seal the records. My suspicion is that attorneys will now routinely move to seal files and judges will grant such motions.