Mike Hatchell was lead counsel, and Molly Hatchell assisted with briefing and oral argument preparation, in a precedent-setting slander case, Bentley v. Bunton, 94 S.W.3d 561 (Tex. 2003), where a public figure - whose defamation claims often founder on the New York Times "actual malice" standard - was permitted to recover defamation damages for falsely being called "corrupt" by the host of a local access television program. The court held that an accusation of official corruption would be defamation per se and, in an important ruling, further determined that the defamatory nature of the word "corrupt" could be determined from the context in which the word was uttered. In the context of this case, so the court held, the word "corrupt" was clearly uttered as a verifiable fact, and "actual malice" attended the utterance, because the speaker (i) offered no verifiable proof of corruption, but (ii) continued to make the accusation while he himself and others expressed self doubt as to its accuracy.