As noted previously on this blog, if an employer falsely suggests to others that an employee was fired for cause when, in truth, the employee quit the job voluntarily, the employer may be liable for defamation. Similarly, when news outlets report on the separation of public figures from their places…
Competing for customers by telling them a competitor is “under investigation” is surprisingly common. I hear this from prospective clients all the time. Most of the time, the accusation isn’t any more specific than that the client is under investigation for something. No one really knows what exactly, but the…
Defamation actions cannot be based on expressions of pure opinion because such statements are protected by the First Amendment. To survive a motion to dismiss, a plaintiff needs to allege a false assertion of fact. Separating fact from opinion, however, is not always as clear-cut as one might expect. Courts…
To be actionable as defamation in Virginia, the words used must be more harmful to a person’s reputation than a common insult or an accusation that most people would consider harmless or unimportant in evaluating a person’s character. Defamatory words are those which “tend so to harm the reputation of…
When a party or an attorney files an objectively baseless defamation complaint, the trial court is required to impose sanctions on one or both of them, including but not limited to an award of attorneys’ fees. This is the main takeaway from Nestler v. Scarabelli decided a few days ago…
The jury trial in the libel and slander case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network is now less than two weeks away. The consensus among defamation law experts seems to be that the “big issue” in this case is whether Fox acted with “actual malice,” a requirement established…
If you’ve been falsely accused of violating a law or breaking a rule, whether that false accusation can be deemed defamatory will depend on which rule you are alleged to have broken. Did someone say that they saw you jaywalk across a busy intersection? That may be false, but let’s…
When relationships go bad, it’s not uncommon for one of the parties to seek to embarrass or harm the other by “exposing” the person for the horrible human being that he or she is. I see this most often in the form of revenge porn, social media bullying campaigns, and…
A 1968 story in the New York Times reports that “Nona Gaprindashvili of the Soviet Union, the women’s world chess champion,” defeated seven men at an international chess tournament in Sweden, where she was the only woman in the field. In the 1983 book, The Queen’s Gambit, which tells the…
As a general rule, statements of opinion are not actionable as defamation. It’s also true, however, that indirect implications from a statement can form the basis of a defamation claim. When a person prefaces a statement with “in my opinion” or “I firmly believe,” it has no effect on whether…