Articles Posted in Defamation, Libel and Slander

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In the United States, the law states that anyone accused of committing a crime is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the public has a tendency to make up its own mind before all of the facts are available. Because of this, a lawsuit, if its allegations are untrue or not based on evidence, can in certain instances do serious damage to the reputation of a person or corporation, even if the lawsuit is ultimately unsuccessful.

One example of this is defendants who are accused of sexual assault. Just the accusation is enough to render the defendant a social leper. When a person’s reputation has sustained severe damage as a result of false accusations made outside the context of lawsuit, that person has the option of recovering those damages by filing a defamation lawsuit.

The problem with defamation lawsuits is that the courts have to walk a fine line between protecting the rights of the individual and protecting the right to free speech. Generally, private citizens have a higher chance of recovering damages from a defamation lawsuit, as the right to discuss public figures is considered to be in the best interest of the public. However, if the plaintiff can prove that the defamatory statements were false, and that the defendant knew they were false, courts will generally rule in favor of the plaintiff.

When a teacher is accused of sexually assaulting a student, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, for that teacher to ever find work again. As a result, a teacher who is wrongly accused of sexual assault, if the accusations are published outside the confines of a privileged setting such as a lawsuit or criminal complaint, can file a defamation lawsuit to recover damages for lost employment opportunities. This is exactly what Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, has done.  The student involved contests these claims. Continue reading ›

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No one likes being the scapegoat in a messy situation. Unfortunately, when large companies lose a lot of money, or don’t make as much as they had anticipated, their first recourse is often to find someone to blame. In the case of Walgreens’s recent $1 billion alleged forecasting error, the company’s CFO at the time, Wade Miquelon, became the alleged scapegoat.

According to reports, Miquelon made an alleged forecasting error that required Walgreens to cut its forecast of pharmacy unit earnings for the year 2016 from $8.5 billion down to $7.4 billion. After the alleged forecasting error, Miquelon and another executive at Walgreens lost their jobs, but Miquelon tells a different alleged story which Walgreens denies.

According to the former CFO, he was not fired from his position. In fact, he claims he was offered a promotion and told that, if he accepted it, he would be in line to succeed Gregory Wasson as Walgreens’s CEO. Instead of taking that opportunity, Miquelon says he left his position “to pursue opportunities outside of Walgreens”. Thanks to accusations made by Wasson and other Walgreens executives though, Miquelon’s opportunities outside of Walgreens have allegedly been severely restricted. Continue reading ›

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Consumers have long relied on recommendations from friends and family before buying products and services, and businesses have risen and fallen like empires on this tradition of word of mouth. Then, the Internet brought about the ability to broadcast your opinion of a business to practically everyone in the world, and to see reviews by people you’ve never met. The potential benefits to businesses of this have to be weighed against the potential detriment when people post negative reviews. Generally, people are only motivated to leave a review if they had a very positive or very negative experience, leaving a skewed perspective of the business on the world wide web.

Some businesses have tried to fight back by including language in their terms of agreement which punishes customers for posting negative reviews online. While the legality of such a measure is in question, consumers all over the Internet have made their displeasure known.

Recently, the Union Street Guest House (USGH), a New York hotel, took it a step further by allegedly including a clause which punishes customers if another customer posts a negative review of the hotel anywhere on the internet. According to the hotel’s policy, “If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. … If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any Internet site you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review.” The policy further noted that the $500 charge would be removed once a negative review was taken down, and that the policy only applied to wedding parties and events. Continue reading ›

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Although there are laws in place to prevent entities and citizens from harmful comments, such laws have to tread carefully to avoid stepping on the toes of the First Amendment to our constitution. The line got even thinner when the Internet was developed. Now people are free to broadcast their opinions all over the world with a relative amount of anonymity. The combination tends to make people freer about stating their thoughts, but if they’re not careful, those people might find themselves facing a lawsuit for defamation.

Sarah Jones, a former cheerleader for the Cincinnati Bengals, has also worked as a teacher at Dixie Heights High School in Edgewood, Kentucky. At the end of 2009, a user of TheDirty.com posted a photo on the website of Jones with a man and made offensive comments about Jones’s sex life, and the sex life of her partner. Jones repeatedly asked for the posts be removed, and Nik Richie, the owner of the website, refused. Jones responded by filing a lawsuit for defamation against the company that operates the gossip site, Dirty World, LLC, and Richie. The lawsuit alleged that the posts humiliated Jones, undermined her position as an educator, her membership in the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader squad, and her personal life.

The content posted on TheDirty.com is never created by Richie, but submitted by third parties. Richie then reviews and publishes the submissions with his own comments. Richie and his attorney cited this as a basis for Richie’s immunity under the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA). Continue reading ›

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Although many people feel that they may have a greater degree of freedom on the Internet due to its anonymous nature, virtually anything posted online can be traced back to the original IP address which was used to upload the content. That IP address can often be used to identify the individual who created the post.

A lawyer recently won a defamation lawsuit against a former client over this very issue. The attorney, Jan Hinson, alleged that her client, Vivek Pampattiwar, lied to her when she asked if a divorce action was pending. Pampattiwar allegedly said that his wife had not filed a counterclaim for divorce in his maintenance action in a separate county, despite the fact that he knew otherwise. Pampattiwar also allegedly failed to inform Hinson that she was the sixth attorney to represent him in the litigation with his wife.

Hinson allegedly checked an online docket to verify that no counterclaim had been filed before she filed a divorce action on behalf of Pampattiwar in Gwinnett County. The online docket, though, was incorrect. Pampattiwar had brought documents to the consultation with Hinson that allegedly showed that counterclaims had, in fact, been filed, but Hinson never read those documents. When Hinson discovered the counterclaims, she dismissed the divorce suit, but then she took over representation for Pampattiwar in another litigation after his lawyer withdrew from the case.

Pampattiwar allegedly resisted dismissing the divorce that Hinson had filed based on misinformation, indicated that he would pay more to have the case litigated in Gwinnett County, and took documents from her office to try to impede the dismissal of the divorce. Hinson later sought to withdraw from the representation and her motion was granted. However, Pampattiwar allegedly begged Hinson to represent him during arbitration until Hinson agreed. Then in October, Hinson allegedly contacted the law firm because he was upset about his legal bills. The complaint which Hinson filed against him alleges that Pampattiwar told a paralegal that Hinson and her staff were crooks.

The very next month, Hinson noticed a sudden significant drop in business. According to her complaint, the phones of her law office “stopped ringing”. Her staff discovered negative reviews of the law firm on Kudzu.com which called her “a CROOK Lawyer” and an “Extremely Fraudulent Lady”. The reviews were traced to an IP address which was associated with Pampattiwar.

During his testimony in the trial, Pampattiwar denied that he had failed to notify Hinson of the counterclaims in the divorce and denied posting the negative reviews of her law practice. The court ruled in Hinson’s favor, with a jury award of around $400,000, and Pampattiwar appealed the decision. In the appellate court, Pampattiwar argued that Hinson should not have relied exclusively on the online docket.

The appellate court upheld the lower court’s ruling. Reginald Greene, representing Pampattiwar in the defamation lawsuit, called the award “improper and excessive”.
Hinson has said that her screening process for taking on new clients has become more stringent as a result of her experiences with Pampattiwar.

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Although laws do exist to protect companies and individuals from harmful false statements, judges enforcing these laws must be careful not to violate the defendant’s right to free speech.

If a plaintiff believes that a defendant’s actions are causing harm, and must be stopped immediately, there are certain forms of emergency litigation which can be used to do this. When filing a complaint against a defendant, the plaintiff can also request that the court grant a preliminary injunction against the defendant’s harmful actions. This protects the plaintiff from any further harm the defendant might do in the months or even years that it can take for the court to reach a decision in the lawsuit. If the plaintiff is successful in proving that the defendant’s actions were harmful and illegal, the preliminary injunction may then become permanent. If, on the other hand, the defendant is successful in defending their case, then the preliminary injunction may be removed.

However, one situation in which courts are unlikely to grant a preliminary injunction is that of defamation. In Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for a court to issue a preliminary injunction to enjoin libelous statements.
This ruling is intended to protect individual consumers against large corporations that have a team of lawyers on their side. The corporation can act quickly to get a local judge to issue a preliminary injunction against the consumer before the defendant even has a chance to acquire her own counsel. Once that happens, the lawsuit is already going in favor of the plaintiff, even though it has just begun. The defendant is censored for the duration of the lawsuit, and any settlement negotiations which might take place do so in the context of the judge having issued a preliminary injunction against the defendant based on the likely outcome of the trial.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling applies to preliminary injunctions all over the country some states have laws which forbid even a permanent injunction to be issued against defamatory statements. In Missouri, for example, the local law points out that the state constitution makes such an injunction an impermissible prior restraint, although certain exceptions to this do exist.
In addition to state and federal laws protecting freedom of speech, some homeowner’s and renter’s policies include coverage which protects the homeowner or renter from accusations of libel. This turned out to be the case when Cooney posted a video on his YouTube page which made some statements about Jim Butler Chevrolet. Butler took these statements to be libelous and had his large law firm file a defamation lawsuit and petition a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against Cooney and his video. The judge complied before Cooney even had a chance to acquire his own attorney.

When he did manage to find legal representation, the lawyer advised Cooney to check his homeowner’s policy. Sure enough, it included libel coverage. They were able to get the judge to dissolve the temporary restraining order and to deny a preliminary injunction. Cooney was then able to restore his video to his YouTube page while the lawsuit progressed.

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The law recognizes that public figures are more likely to be the subject of defamatory statements than private citizens. This is especially true when a public figures dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Amid rumors surrounding the recent death of the actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, was a report in the National Enquirer that he and the playwright, David Bar Katz, had been lovers.

Once the report came out, Katz said, “After I dropped the kids at school I looked at my phone, and I’ve gotten a million calls.” He also said that photographers were stalking him on the street. Although Katz said that he was tempted to ignore it, his friends urged him to file a libel lawsuit. Shortly after he did so, the Enquirer withdrew the article with an apology.
The report inaccurately quoted Katz as saying that he and Hoffman were lovers, that they had freebased cocaine the night of Hoffman’s death, and that Katz had seen Hoffman using cocaine many times.

It is well known that Katz and Hoffman were good friends. While they met through friends in the movie industry about fifteen years ago, they didn’t become close until later, when their children began attending the same school in Greenwich Village. They would often have breakfast together after the school drop-off. However, Katz insists that, although he and Hoffman discussed addiction, Hoffman never did drugs in front of him.

Mr. Burstein of the National Enquirer explained that the false report was an honest mistake. He said that his reporters “did a search and found someone named David Katz who appeared to be the son of David’s father. They asked, ‘Are you David Katz who is the playwright?'” He said that he was and they believed him. Burstein further explained that the man “sounded distraught. They couldn’t believe that someone would be so callous to say, ‘I’m the real David Katz'” when he wasn’t. Burstein said that the interview was conducted by a senior reporter who worked on the story with some researchers. The reporter was convinced that it was the right person.

The lawsuit was quickly settled, although Katz did not claim any money for himself. Instead, he formed the American Playwriting Foundation which will give out an annual prize of $45,000 for an unproduced play. It is to be called the Relentless Award. The foundation and the prize are both being paid for by the National Enquirer and its publisher, American Media Incorporated as a part of the settlement of the libel lawsuit. The exact amount of money that the Enquirer paid to settle the lawsuit has not been revealed, although Mr. Burstein did say that “It’s enough for the foundation to give out these grants for years to come.”

As part of the settlement, the Enquirer also provided Katz with contact details for the person who fooled them into thinking that he was David Katz. The real Katz has said that he intends to sue the man, although he hasn’t filed yet. He wants to be sure that he files the lawsuit against the correct person.

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Many employers will not hire an employee if it is known that the employee has filed for bankruptcy or is suffering from debt. This can then harm the employee’s ability to make money in order to escape her debt.

This allegedly happened with the famous basketball player, Scottie Pippin. Since his retirement from playing basketball in 2004, Pippin has lost a large portion of his fortune through bad investments. As a result, he has filed multiple lawsuits against some of his former financial and legal advisors, whom he feels misled him. When the media heard of Pippin’s financial problems, several news organizations reported that the basketball star had filed for bankruptcy, which is not true.

Pippin then filed a lawsuit against some of these news organizations for defamation, alleging that the reports have had a negative impact on his ability to acquire product endorsements and personal appearances.

The Northern District of Illinois, in which the suit was initially filed, dismissed the case, stating that the complaint contained falsehoods which did not fit into any category of statements which are recognized by Illinois law as being so innately harmful that damages can be assumed.

Because Scottie Pippin is a public figure, he bears a heavier burden of proof in order to file a claim for defamation than a private citizen would. This is because public figures have greater access to the media through which they can refute defamatory statements. Private citizens are less likely to have the same level of access, thereby rendering defamation innately more harmful to a private citizen than to a public figure.

The court also found insufficient evidence that the statements had been published with actual malice, rather than ignorance. Because Pippin is a public figure, he needed to prove that the false statements were a product of actual malice in order to file claims. In order to qualify for actual malice, the defendant must have known that the statement was false and published it anyway. When a media outlet fails to confirm that a statement is false, a plaintiff might be able to sue them for negligence, but not actual malice. Although Pippin alerted the defendants to the falsity of their statements after publication, it was not enough to prove that actual malice existed at the time that the statement was published.

Additionally, cases of defamation in the state of Illinois are subject to the Single Publication Act, which provides that a claim for defamation is complete after the first publication. The Act was put in place to protect speakers and writers from facing multiple lawsuits regarding a single statement which was mass-produced.

Pippin argued that the Single Publication Act does not apply to material posted on the Internet. This, according to Pippin, is because those who publish on the Internet, as the defendants in this lawsuit did, can more easily post and delete material. Therefore, Pippin argued that every day that the defamatory material remains on the website after the publisher knows that it is false constitutes a republication of the material.

The Single Publication Act does not deal directly with statements published online, so the court was forced to infer from decisions made in similar cases in other courts. Based on these past decisions, the court ruled that the Single Publication Act does apply to material published on the Internet. As a result, the news organizations can only be held responsible for the first publication of the defamatory statement.

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While the law can protect citizens against defamation, there are limits to the kinds of statements which are considered defamatory. Generally speaking, a statement must be made publicly in order to be actionable under defamation law. Under most circumstances, any reports that an airline makes to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have immunity from defamation lawsuits. Despite this fact, William Hoeper, a former pilot for Air Wisconsin, filed a defamation lawsuit against the airline for making a report to the TSA which stated that they were concerned about his mental stability and that he may be armed.

The airline filed a report after Hoeper failed a final flight simulator test which he needed to pass in order to continue working for the airline. Hoeper admits that, upon his failure, he tossed his headset, exchanged words “at an elevated decible level”, and accused the instructor of creating an unrealistic test. As a pilot, Hoeper was authorized to carry a gun and airline officials worried that he would be able to bypass security while carrying a weapon.

Because it is in the public’s best interest for airlines to report suspicious behavior to the TSA, airlines are granted immunity from defamation lawsuits when filing these reports. Only if the airline makes these reports with reckless disregard for the truth can it be held accountable under relevant defamation law. The Colorado Supreme Court found that, in this instance, the airline did not have immunity and so it awarded Hoeper $1.2 million in damages.

The decision was appealed and the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The Supreme Court found that, because the airline’s report to the TSA was not materially false, the airline still had immunity regarding that report. The Court therefore reversed the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion where he partially disagreed with the Court’s ruling. He argued that the case should have been remanded for further proceedings once it was determined that the material falsity standard was applicable in this case. He also argued that the award for damages could be justified given the report’s association of Hoeper’s conduct with mental illness.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed, arguing that fretting over word choice could delay reports of suspicious behavior to the TSA. Sotomayor also pointed out in her majority opinion that Hoeper “cannot dispute the literal truth of the airline’s report to the TSA, leaving him with no room to sue for defamation. She further wrote that the statement that the airline’s supervisors were concerned about Hoeper’s mental stability conveyed the gist of the situation.

Sotomayor took issue with Scalia’s assertion that Hoeper’s “display of anger” made him no more of a threat than “millions of perfectly harmless travelers.” Sotomayor argued that “Hoeper did not just lose his temper, he lost it in circumstances that he knew would lead to his firing, which he regarded as the culmination of a vendetta against him. And he was not just any passenger; he was [authorized to carry a firearm]”.

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In the world of defamation, there have long been two categories, which until recently, have covered all forms of defamation: slander, which includes any verbal defamation of a person or entity and; libel, which covers any defamatory comments made in writing. Now, with the growth of communicating over the internet, it appears that a new category of defamation is developing.

As courts continue to struggle to adapt the law to new and changing technology, a lawyer, Rhonda Holmes, has filed a defamation lawsuit against her former client, Courtney Love, for comments made on Twitter. Holmes was representing Love in a case Love wanted to bring regarding the estate of her late husband, Kurt Cobain. Love allegedly sent a Twitter message which claimed that Holmes had been “bought off” concerning the case.

Love’s current attorneys have argued that the language used on Twitter is hasty and opinionated, and as such, should not be treated the same as language used in a more formal setting. That argument though, appears not to hold much weight given Holmes’s recent testimony. In a sworn statement, Holmes said that Love agreed to settle the case for $600,000 and make a retraction of her defamatory statement. Love then allegedly failed to pay up and republished the offending comment.Barry Langberg, the attorney representing Holmes in the present lawsuit, claims that Love’s tweet was part of “a concerted effort … to destroy Ms. Holmes and her law firm.”
The lawsuit also includes subsequent critical statements that Love made in an online article about an unnamed female attorney. The court will consider whether Holmes’s reputation and business could have been affected by those comments.

John Lawrence, one of Love’s attorneys in the current lawsuit, says that, at the time that she made the defamatory comments on Twitter, Love believed that she had been abandoned by Holmes and her firm. However, Love’s beliefs at the time that she made the comment may not count if she later republished the comment.

Langberg claims that Holmes was devastated when Love fired her, but Love says she never fired her. Instead, Love did say, “in my mind I let her go”.

This is the first lawsuit in the United States to reach a trial court based on alleged defamation happening on Twitter. Poynter Institute has called it the first “Twibel” trial in the country. The decision that the court reaches in this case will have far-reaching consequences for similarly cases all over the country. The Los Angeles Superior Court rejected the assertion that comments made by Love on Twitter should be treated any differently than comments made in a more formal setting. If other courts make similar rulings in line with that of the Los Angeles Superior Court, it could change the way defamation cases are argued in our court system.
Since defamation is, by definition, comments made which are public and harmful, it makes sense that a court would not be lenient with a defendant who made defamatory comments on a social media site as public as Twitter.

After the Court’s ruling the case went to trial. After just four hours deliberating, the jury determined that Love had published the tweet, and that it was false. 11 of the jurors concluded the false statements would harm Holmes’s reputation. But the jury ruled 9-3 that Holmes’s lawyers had failed to prove that Love knew at the time that the statement was false, and so could not be found liable of defamation.

Although the jury did not award Holmes the $8 million she was claimed Love should pay as damages, Holmes’s attorney, Mitchell Langberg told Reuters that Holmes felt pleased her reputation restored. “What she’s really happy about is when the jury found that she didn’t get bought off, that she didn’t abandon her client for money.”

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