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Mom Makes Website, Gets Sued for $2 Million
An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian stay-at-home mom of 3 recently created a website to report on environmental problems around her neighborhood. The general public and governmental workers lauded her for her efforts. The environmental Ministry spokesman was even quoted as saying 'Obviously we can't have staff everywhere all the time, so we depend on the public out there as surrogate eyes and ears for the ministry'. However, not everyone was quite as happy, as she soon found out, when one company decided to sue her for libel to the tune of $2 million."
Bad: Woman rights remarks about your company.
Worse: Sue said woman for more than she can ever possibly make under normal circumstances, breaking her family apart and probably separating her three kids.
They could have made it 'better' by being like "We're glad you brought this to our attention and we're going to fix it. Thanks for your vigilence!"
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I've been to a handful of corporations that have radically switched from a 'Covetous' image to a more 'environmental-and-neighborhood-friendly' image. Refineries like Valero (Houston, TX) are among those.
My first reaction is that the company is scum. It tries to bury the truth instead of dealing with it. But it is essential to know whether or not her claims are in fact false before questioning the validity of the suit. After all, I can't just say something bad about a company that does bad things.
Then again, you would think the firm would go out of its way to disprove her allegations. It doesn't seem to even try. At trial, the firm would likely need to show her statements as false. If she's telling the truth, I bet the firm will crumble. Rather that having all of their dirt come out in open court, they'll use a last minute excuse like "We felt bad for her kids, so we are letting her outrageous claims go... this time."
I can't wait to see how this turns out.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
--dave (who went to university in KW) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Case in point: I have a neighbor. He's an old man with a bad attitude who is basically a crank. He also walks around the neighborhood look for "issues" and is a total PITA if you get on his bad side. A few years ago, my boy (who was about 3-4 years old at the time) was obssessed with hoses, drains and pipes. He LOVED to put together sprinkler systems using PVC in my back yard. Of course, I encouraged him in his hobby, even though my water bill wasn't exactly pleasant news.
Well, the water running down the street just drove my neighbor insane. He tried to convince the neighborhood that the water was going to degrade the street. When that didn't work, he actually reported me to the Environmental Protection Agency (who sent out a very nice woman, who was very impressed with my son's sprinkler systems when I happily showed her around).
And I wasn't the only one -- at various times, he has had run-ins with the neighbors over phantom problems. The guy lives to find issues that don't exist.
So you'll pardon me if I don't necessarily believe this woman isn't a total wack-job without more evidence beyond this article.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Seems to be offline but here's the google cache link if you're interested: http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:zQLM8Fs0lo8J:c a.geocities.com/infringements%40rogers.com/+Louise tte+Lanteigne&hl=en&client=firefox-a
Now, the problem I have is that even if she drops the website and the company continues to pursue the lawsuit, she has so much to lose. She's risking the well-being of her three kids to battle a libel case, one which she (presumably) has no funds to support. I'm not suggesting its wrong to take a stand, but I know first-hand what it is like to battle a corporation when you are being sued. My best friend was sued $150,000 by a company (he had an accidental fire in the house he was renting) and lost everything. The company never got a dime from him, but he was forced into bankruptcy, fell behind on all his bills, and to this day is still being tracked by companies trying to collect for unpaid bills. He lost to the one with financial superiority, and this really threw his life off course -- all over an accidental fire. Now he can't get a mortgage, credit cards, or much else.
If I was in this woman's position, I'd value the well-being of my kids over battling a corporation, because odds are she will not walk away from this in a better position than she was before this lawsuit started.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
This case shows the merit of the loser pays rule.
It's the only way civil court proceedings can be made even remotely fair -- instead of the extortion/lottery they are in the US right now.
The woman appears to be quite the alarmist. For example, she falsely states that pressure treated wood is not safe since it is treated with, among other things, arsenic. Such wood is safe if handled properly.
On the other hand, she doesn't say anything on there that is immediately libelous as most of it is "i saw this happening the other day at the site."
I've always wondered what the internal culture is in companies that leads them to launch suits like this, as they almost always backfire even if they are won. The McDonald's lawsuit against a couple of people distributing anti-McDonald's pamphlets, for example, certainly led to much more anti-McDonald's media coverage than a couple of nutty activists could ever have managed on their own.
My wife and me, her being a conservation biologist, me just your regular treehugger, were planning on making a site here ins Costa Rica, based on photos we would take riding around the country, me on my bike, her on her quad (both silenced, small bore, so don;t flame about exhaust fumes and saving the earth ....
....
.... so not we are re-thinking our strategy ...
........ but now we are really reconsidering ....
There are a bunch of local and foreign companies making serious damage, and we want to give it some exposure, besides riding around on our vehicles
quite honestly that news piece made us think about how many companies would want to sue our asses if we get noticed
Our plan was to sneak around various industrial installations with a GPS and a digicam, and then post it blog-style with the help of goolge maps api
Would YOU have the balls?
The lady should counter sue the company for attempting to drive her into bankruptcy. She should sue for percentually as much, based on the company's income, as the company is suing her, i.e. if her yearly income is $60'000 and she get's sued for $2million, then if the company's yearly income is $10million then she should sue for $400million. She should plainly state that she is counter suing because the company is maliciously attempting to drive her into bankruptcy with an amount that she could never pay instead of just suing to get her to close down the website.
She might not win, but it would provide precedence for annyone who is harrassed by giant companies in the future. (Hallo RIAA, did you hear that?) IT sure would be good to see some of those corporations think twice before abusing their power in future.
There was at one time in the western system of jurisprudence the notion of a Trial by Combat whereby the acused had the right to compel the acuser or his champion to engage him (the defendant) or his champion in a judicially sanctioned duel whereby the judgement of God would decide the winner. The theory being that God would strengthen the arm and sharpen the skills of the party representing the truth thereby allowing him or his champion to overcome the guilty or his champion. Although there is little evidence in the modern context to prove it, I would bet that society in general would be more civil and courteous if one risked life and limb by slandering his neighbor or falsly acusing him. How many corporate executives would acuse people of slander or insult them in public if they had to face the defendant or his champion at the wrong end of a sharp and pointy object?
Based on her website, I think we might be able to take educated guesses at two of the mysteries:
1) What else is going on:
From her site: "Right now the Vista Hills land is up for rezoning. Ironically, this subdivision is already featured in an area phone book and it was on a free commercial map that was distributed to area homes. Even real estate guides have featured the completed Vista Hills subdivision on their maps for four years. The truth is the land is still agricultural. If the rezoning to residential takes place before the moraine is protected this subdivision will be built.
I ask both the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Labour to please step in and see what you can do in regards to protecting our groundwater from Activa. We know their history. The citizens of Waterloo Region simply cannot afford the risk. "
Public perception does not equate to much bottom line for a contractor; government rezoning does. It sounds like she was starting to have some success with the various ministries.
2) What their case is based on:
From her site: " Allow me to clairify once again, this website is designed to facilitate the reporting of labour and environmental law infringements to municipal, provincial and federal officials and to try to educate the public on the subject of safety so they can also make their own reports if necessary. In order to place the reports and to illustrate the existing situations I have to mention where I saw the infringements and what companies are involved. It's that simple."
Reporting on what she has seen is one thing. Charging specific companies with breaking the law is another. If the site simply reported oil spills and unsafe workers it would be one thing. Publishing beliefs about the legalities of the contractor's actions puts on record very specific and disprovable claims.
Regardless she is obviously well intentioned. I hope she gets some help in this.
Cdn law is different from US law in a number of important instiutional details. The judge can and will award costs. Even if the company is technically correct, it could still wind up paying the defense costs. Automagically if the defendant pays a nominal sum "into court" and the award is less than this.
Let this be a lesson. In the days of cheap digital cameras, if you're going to take on a task like this woman did, you might as well photograph every last thing and notate when the pictures were taken, and under what circumstances.
If that became a common practice, it's easy to imagine the bigger engineering companies collaborating with our elected officials to create laws and ordinances against "photographing at a construction site" or some shit. Something unconstitutional but meant to up the ante a litle bit for anyone who wants to take this task on.
In the mean time, give 'em hell.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Indeed. I think that a lot of American forget that (I'm pretty sure) the only modern western democracy still without a bill of rights or equivalent is Australia (for which we will pay dearly in the years to come, I fear). So unless all countries that are not the US are equivalent to Australia, then I don't think they "need a bill of rights" or anything of the sort.
(There was even a referendum in Australia on whether we should have a (very limited) "bill of rights and freedoms" in our constitution in 1988; it was rejected by a majority of all Australians as well as a majority in all states and territories and so did not pass. I imagine that the line of thinking that leads to this is we could've done better. Still, I was only four years old at the time, so I don't really know the details. Additionally, while there was some discussion in the lead up to the creation of our constitution, this was in the days when people actually respected tradition, and it was believed that a British Common Law based constitution & the traditions so implied would necessarily prevent anyone restricting the rights that are rightfully ours.)
(It should be noted that our activist High Court judges have interpreted the fact that ours is a democratic constitution as necessarily implying that we must have a right to free speech (for how else could we fully exercise the necessary public discourse for democracy to be meaningful?), but of course this is dependent on who the High Court judges are, and I'm pretty sure that since they've done this they've said gone off and said the exact opposite anyway. And of course I think our activist judges have done a lot more harm than good over the hundred and few years since they came into existence.)
Look out!
Knowing builders and developers like I do, I can say with out fear of contradiction that they all infringe to some extent in some fashion or othe,r some of the enviromental or safety laws. She just has to prove this, it will be pretty easy to do if all she will need is a little bit of support from knowledgeable people from the industry i.e. competitors, subcontractors with an axe to grind, ex-employees, disgruntled customers etc. (I think they needed their collective heads read for starting something that is pretty well gauranteed to blow up in their collective faces).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"I am proud to be an American where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff in such a case."
No it's not. This is a civil trial, not criminal, which means that it relies on something that in the US is called the preponderance of evidence. The defendant (nor the plaintiff) is not given any sort of special treatment or presumption, both sides have to argue their respective cases on their own merits. In the flippant example of "So-and-so eats babies!" the defendant would still have to demonstrate why it is reasonable for them to believe that the plaintiff actually eats babies.
The differences between US states and other common law jurisdictions are a bit more complicated. The only big difference is that, in a US state, there'd be the option of having this heard before a civil jury.
With the laywer(s) salary, the company could probably hire a cleanup crew for a week and really put a positive spin on this story.
"Look, we REALLY care about the environment". "We listen to people"... but noooo, let's release the hounds, show that we are just faceless corportaion that doesn't give a shit about anything but the bottom line. And our laywers have to look busy, or they will lose their $160.000 jobs and company cars...