When California congressman Devin Nunes, a public figure, decided to file a pair of defamation lawsuits against Twitter (based in California), The McClatchy Company (based in California), and others, why do you suppose he selected Virginia as his forum of choice? One popular theory is that Virginia’s anti-SLAPP laws are…
Another federal judge faced with interpreting Virginia’s insulting-words statute has found that (1) a face-to-face confrontation is not required, and (2) if the words at issue are defamatory per se, then they automatically satisfy the requirements of the statute. The case is Christen Waddle v. Aundrea Claughton, currently pending in…
In a defamation per se case, the jury will be instructed that it may presume damages and award a monetary recovery to the plaintiff even in the absence of any evidence of specific harm caused by the defamatory statements. This goes against the general rule that juries cannot award damages…
We lawyers like to write about two types of libel and slander: defamation per se, and defamation per quod. Using Latin terms makes us sound smart, we think. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know what we’re talking about. The problem isn’t that the lawyers are stupid, but that the courts use…
Under Virginia law, rhetorical hyperbole is not defamatory. Rhetorical hyperbole refers to statements that–while they may seem at first glance to express factual assertions about a person–cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts. To prove defamation, a plaintiff needs to show falsity; rhetorical hyperbole does not literally assert facts,…
When a defamatory statement is republished by another person, that person may be held liable to the same extent as the original defamer. I recently wrote about liability for rumor-mongering and focused on the potential liability of the person spreading rumors heard from another source. This month, I want to…
When the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun-rights organization, sued Katie Couric for defamation back in 2016, the two big issues from a legal perspective were (1) whether the edited video of the VCDL members conveyed a false statement of fact, and (2) if so, whether that false message carried…
Republication of a libel may be grounds for defamation liability. (See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 578; Lee v. Dong–A Ilbo, 849 F.2d 876, 878 (4th Cir. 1988) (“Under the republication rule, one who repeats a defamatory statement is as liable as the original defamer”)). Liability, however, is not automatic,…
Appearances can be deceiving. But in terms of analyzing whether a particular government employee should be treated as a “public official” for purposes of asserting a defamation claim, appearances may make all the difference in whether a plaintiff will be required to show malice or merely negligence. Horne v. WTVR…
As I looked over a recent batch of opinions from the Western District of Virginia, one of them caught my eye for two reasons. First, I never imagined that a person might file a federal lawsuit against Golden Corral over an accusation of stealing chicken legs. We truly live in…