Is payment an affirmative defense for a guarantor?

In the earlier case of Levy Gardens Partners v. Commonwealth Land Title Ins. Co., the Fifth Circuit concluded that a pleading about the extent of coverage was “fundamental to the complaint” and “did not raise a new matter outside of the complaint”; accordingly, it did not implicate the rules about the pleading of affirmative defenses.  706 F.3d 622, 633 (5th Cir. 2013).  In contrast, in LSRef2 Baron LLC v. Tauch, the Court held that a guarantor’s defense of payment by the primary obligor was an affirmative defense.  After a review of Louisiana law on the topics of offset and setoff, which characterizes those matters as defenses, the Court concluded that “[Plaintiff] simply had to allege in its complaint that there was an event of default, which is defined in the Loan Agreement, not in the Guaranty.”  The Court also agreed that the issue had not been raised in a “pragmatically sufficient time,” as “all of the critical pretrial deadlines had passed or were about to expire.”