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The Enquirer maintains that it has not lost a major lawsuit in the three years since the research department was set up. "We can't afford to touch an iffy story," says Dick Allison, assistant to the president. "If it doesn't pass the lawyers, we don't run it." Adds an Enquirer freelancer: "Ninety percent of our stories are true. They may be defamatory, but they're accurate."
Win or lose, the entertainers suing the Enquirer say they want to make the paper less sensational and thus less destructive. Back in the 1950s, lawsuits by Actor Robert Mitchum and Heiress Doris Duke helped force Confidential magazine to stop printing its unsupportable exposes; circulation plunged from 4.1 million to 300,000, and the scandal sheet folded. A similar collapse by the Enquirer is highly improbable, but the celebrities feel it is time to make a stand, Says Calhoun, who charges that the paper erred last September in reporting that he had cancer: "It's such a tacky little rag the wonder of it is that anyone takes it seriously. [But] it appears you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to destroy careers, lives and reputations."