The Virginia Defamation Law Blog
Under the single-publication rule, a defamatory statement posted online will be treated as a single publication, made at the time of posting, regardless of when and how many people actually view the content. Without such a rule, Virginia’s one-year statute of limitations would be rendered meaningless, because a new cause of action would arise each time a new person clicked a link leading to defamatory content, even if that were to occur 10 or 20 years from the date the material was originally uploaded. At the same time, however, Virginia law imposes liability against those who “republish” a defamatory statement, even if republication occurs after the statute of limitations has run on the original statement. When pursuing libel remedies for a statement uploaded to the internet over a year ago, consider whether the statement has been republished by anyone within the past 12 months.
This approach was tried, albeit without success, by the plaintiff in Svetlana Lokhova v. Stefan A. Halper. Ms. Lokhova is a Russian-born British historian and author whose work has focused on the Soviet intelligence service. She had some contact with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn back in 2014–minimal contact, according to the complaint. She says she met him briefly at a dinner in England and exchanged only a few emails afterwards. Various press accounts in 2017 noted that certain individuals had expressed concern upon learning that the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency appeared to have a friendly relationship with a Russian woman with alleged ties to Russian intelligence–surmising among other things that such a connection could make Flynn susceptible to extortion. One example cited in the complaint is this passage from a New York Times article:
The informant also had contacts with Mr. Flynn, the retired Army general who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. The two met in February 2014, when Mr. Flynn was running the Defense Intelligence Agency and attended the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, an academic forum for former spies and researchers that meets a few times a year. According to people familiar with Mr. Flynn’s visit to the intelligence seminar, the source was alarmed by the general’s apparent closeness with a Russian woman who was also in attendance. The concern was strong enough that it prompted another person to pass on a warning to the American authorities that Mr. Flynn could be compromised by Russian intelligence, according to two people familiar with the matter.