New York Real Estate Lawyer Blog

The growing popularity of the Internet as a means of communication has created a new way to spread potentially defamatory statements. Users may be held accountable in court for making defamatory remarks in these informal - but very public - forums, and blog posts. As long as statements are demonstrably false, someone other than the alleged defamer received the defamatory message, and the content was intended to injure or expose the victim to contempt or ridicule, Internet users can be liable for defamation.

So, what is defamatory, I recently saw an interesting article trying to explain when a New York Court might find a statement to be "opinion" (non actionable), as opposed to actionable words for defamation.

Defamation is generally defined as a false statement of fact that is harmful to some one's reputation. Many people mistakenly believe that only factual utterances are actionable for defamation liability. Opinion, however, is actionable if it can be reasonably understood as declaring or implying actual facts that can be proven true or false. Courts examine the totality of the circumstances to distinguish factual statements from actual expressions of opinion.

In the article, the author reported that constitutionally protected "opinion," within the context of that case, could be words and phrases as "leech," "sleazy male worm," "a showbiz reject," "parasite," "a loose cannon," "pathological," "lazy" and "unethical and sleazy."

In finding some of the words actionable, the Court permitted the case to proceed where the blogger "kept [defendant's] name and likeness on his website during the peak of the Departed and blocked work from [defendant]," that "[plaintiff] lied to many people taking credit when he brought nothing to the table" and "used [defendant's] name ... to lure people to the business" were factual, and thus provided a predicate for plaintiff's defamation cause of action.

The bottom line-- defamation actions require very careful analysis of what statements might be the expression of opinion (jealously protected by our Constitution and case law), as opposed to what might be factually based and maliciously intended statements of fact. Hire a New York Litigation Lawyer who will review the intricacies of such statements.

As we all feel, some more than others, the economic recession has resulted in hundreds of thousands of suits filed by bill collectors in the New York courts. We always learned that a plaintiff (the collector) must prove the debt. Well, New York judges are here to tell these collectors that they better have a real and viable debt, which they can prove.

As recently reported by the NYTimes, a number of New York judges are speaking out against the increasingly sloppy litigation and collection practices of credit card debt collectors, who simply fail to investigate the claims, don't have documentary proof of the debt, fail to properly serve the debtor, and make all sorts of errors when trying to collect often stale debt.

For example, one Manhattan appeals court recently threw out a credit card case because the debt collection company had apparently sued the wrong person; while a Nassau County District Court ordered a law firm to pay $14,800 in sanctions for ethical violations stemming from their improper debt collection efforts, which included ignoring court orders, making false statements, and harassing an alleged debtor even after the debt and case was dismissed. "Debt collectors seemed to think their lawsuits were taking place in a legal Land of Oz, where everyone was supposed to follow anti-consumer rules invented by some unseen debt-collection wizard."

The bottom line-- debtors have the right to verification of debt, and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act has teeth-- use it.