A hometown case.

Thanks to my former colleague, David M. Rogero, Esq., of Coral Gables Florida for bringing the following item from my hometown paper to my attention:

From the Miami Herald, Miami blog postings spark $25 million lawsuit

By PATRICK DANNER

• Developer Tibor Hollo has filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against a Miami real estate agent who blogged that the octogenarian went bankrupt in the 1980s and is headed for a fall with the upheaval in the condo market. Hollo last week sued agent Lucas Lechuga and the Coral Gables brokerage Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell alleging they have engaged in a smear campaign against him and his Opera Tower condo development on Lechuga's Miami Condo Investments blog.
  

The asserted defamation? A November 25 blog post wherein the defendant stated:

• "This developer went bankrupt in the 1980s and I think we'll see a repeat performance within the next 6 months. What do I know, though? I'm no real estate oracle."

The developer (and now plaintiff) counters that he never went bankrupt. Note that the original post does not say that the plaintiff had filed for bankruptcy, which is a legal nicety. One can go bankrupt (in the sense of having more debt than capital) and recover just fine. Since truth is a defense to defamation, this matter may await the discovery process to determine if there was any point in the 1980's where the statement holds true.

Fellow blogger Marc Randazza was quick to identify this as a SLAPP suit (the clever acronym for a "strategic lawsuit against public participation") - an effort to use litigation to intimidate or silence a critic from speaking badly about the litigant, even where the matter is protected speech about a matter of public importance. There is a question of infinite recursion there - could Hollo sue Randazza for deeming this a SLAAP suit? Almost certainly not, since the lawsuit itself is clearly a matter of public importance.

In this case (as in most cases), if the intent of the litigant was to squelch bad speech, it has badly backfired, and the assertion - true or not - has been spread much farther and wider than the defendant blogger had intended (or likely could have imagined).

This also raises the somewhat interesting issue of defamation over the Internet - I say "somewhat" because it really is not much different from defamation through any other media, except as to how quickly it spreads. There are also some immunity issues that arise with respect to internet service providers under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), but those issues are not present in this case, as the defendant is the blogger himself, and not whichever service hosts the blog.

My utterly confident prediction in this case is that the plaintiff will not win the $25 million in damages that he seeks. You can take that to the bank.