Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
The cease-and-desist letter gives you ten days. You wrote a review, or warned a customer, or told an unflattering truth about a former vendor in a way that cost him a sale, and now his lawyer calls it defamation. The letter demands that you retract the statement, take down the post, and apologize, or face a lawsuit seeking damages it sets in the six figures. It is printed on heavy letterhead and written to make you reach for the delete key before you reach for a lawyer. The threat is designed to make silence look like the cheapest path.
Before you take anything down, understand what Illinois law actually protects, because a great many of these letters demand the retraction of speech that no court could ever call defamatory. A defamation claim is far harder to win than the letter lets on, the First Amendment and the Illinois Constitution protect opinion and truth at the threshold, and Illinois has an anti-SLAPP statute, strengthened in 2025, that can turn a bullying lawsuit into a bill the sender has to pay. The letter is the opening move in a negotiation, not the verdict it pretends to be.
A defamation claim in Illinois, as the Supreme Court set out in Solaia Technology v. Specialty Publishing Company, requires a false statement of fact about the plaintiff, an unprivileged publication of that statement to someone else, and resulting damage. The words that decide most cases are “false” and “of fact.” Opinion is not defamation, truth is not defamation, and a statement the law treats as privileged is not defamation, no matter how much it stung.
The first and strongest defense is truth, and Illinois does not demand perfection. A defendant need only show that the gist, or the sting, of the statement is substantially true, as the courts explained in Global Relief Foundation v. New York Times Company and in Coghlan v. Beck. A minor inaccuracy in the details does not make a substantially accurate statement actionable. If what you said was true in its essence, the claim fails however much the plaintiff dislikes hearing it.
The second defense is that opinion is not defamation. A statement that cannot be proven true or false is protected by the Constitution, and Illinois decides the question by asking whether the statement has a precise and verifiable meaning, and whether its context signals fact or commentary, the factors drawn from Solaia and restated in Imperial Apparel v. Cosmo’s Designer Direct. The Seventh Circuit, applying Illinois law in Law Offices of David Freydin v. Chamara, held that one-star online reviews calling a lawyer a disgrace and worse were protected opinion, even though they questioned his professional ability. Reviews, criticism, and heated comparison usually live on the opinion side of that line. The limit, set by the Supreme Court in Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Company, is that labeling a statement opinion is no shield if it implies a specific, provably false fact, so the analysis is always about substance rather than the word you attached to it.
The third protection is the innocent construction rule. As the Illinois Supreme Court held in Chapski v. Copley Press, a statement that is reasonably capable of an innocent interpretation, read in context and given its natural meaning, cannot be the basis of a per se defamation claim, and the court decides that question as a matter of law at the pleading stage, before the cost and intrusion of discovery.
The fourth set of defenses are the privileges. The fair report privilege, recognized in Solaia, protects an accurate account of an official proceeding and cannot be overcome even by proof of ill will. The absolute litigation privilege, applied in Popp v. O’Neil, protects statements connected to a judicial proceeding. And a qualified privilege, as the court explained in Kuwik v. Starmark Star Marketing and Administration, protects statements made in good faith to someone with a corresponding interest in the subject, an employer, a regulator, or a warning to a fellow member of a trade, and is lost only where the speaker abuses it.
The fifth defense is the constitutional fault requirement, and it is fatal to many of these letters. If the person complaining is a public official or a public figure, New York Times Company v. Sullivan requires him to prove actual malice, that you knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was true. Even a private figure, under Gertz v. Robert Welch, must prove fault, and cannot recover presumed or punitive damages without meeting that high standard. The businesses and public personalities most likely to send an aggressive cease-and-desist letter are often the very plaintiffs who would have to clear the highest bar in defamation law.
Illinois also arms the recipient of a meritless, speech-chilling suit with a weapon of its own. The Citizen Participation Act, 735 ILCS 110, lets a defendant move early to dispose of a lawsuit brought to punish protected speech and participation, stays discovery while that motion is pending, and shifts attorney’s fees to the party who prevails on it. The legislature broadened the Act in 2025, directing courts to construe it liberally, extending its protection to the press, and removing the narrow reading an earlier decision had given it. A defamation threat meant to silence a critic can become the basis on which the critic recovers the cost of the defense.
One more protection matters if you host other people’s words rather than write your own. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. 230, generally bars treating the operator of a website or review platform as the publisher of what a third party posted there. The protection runs to the platform, not to the original author, so it shields the business that hosts a review while leaving the person who wrote it to answer for it.
Three steps protect you in the first week. First, do not delete in a panic. Preserve the statement, its context, and the evidence that supports it, because a contemporaneous record of why what you said was true or fair is the heart of the defense, and a hasty deletion can look like an admission. Second, separate fact from opinion in what you actually said, sentence by sentence, because that line decides most of these cases. Third, answer the letter through counsel rather than in your own words, since an unguarded reply can hand the sender the very admission he was missing.
A cease-and-desist letter costs the sender a stamp, and it is written to cost you your voice. Some demands are legitimate, and a genuinely false statement of fact is protected by nothing. But Illinois law protects opinion, substantial truth, and fair comment at the threshold, and it now turns the cost of a meritless suit back on the party who filed it. The people who lose their speech are usually the ones who surrender it before they learn what it was worth.
At DiTommaso Lubin, P.C., we defend Illinois businesses and individuals against defamation claims and the cease-and-desist letters that precede them, from the first demand through anti-SLAPP motions and dispositive briefing. If a letter is demanding that you retract or delete speech that may be opinion, truth, or privileged comment, what you do in the first days can decide whether you are ever sued at all. Call DiTommaso Lubin, P.C. at 630-333-0333 for a free consultation, or contact us online. We can help you protect what you said, and shift the cost back to the sender when the claim is meritless.