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Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."
Maybe TheDirt.com should sue Sarah Jones for libel for making false and damaging defamatory statements about them to the courts and to the press.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
It's not her fault. She got the lawyer to do her homework for her.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm gonna sue slashdork!
Too bad we can't register justicey.gov and repost the libel and slander...
The stupid...it hurts me!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This has to be the best evidence that I have seen that our "Justice" system is broken. Did the judge not even bother looking at the evidence? And what were they thinking proceeding with a verdict without the defendant having a voice in the proceedings? It sounds like both the court and the suing attorneys completely ignored their due diligence duties and I hope they hang (financially & professionally) for it.
Was her lawyer blonde too?
someone was upset by certain comments and they are sending us a message.
new sig
Sarah Jones beats her children and smokes crack in front of them while doing it. sue that
Is that not a bit much, so much that most people/websites would just have to declare bankruptcy.
How is that a fair judgment, simple because they did not respond to completely unfounded and false claims about themselves.
and even if they did sue the right people, that is way to high.
If you ask me it is the judge that should be fined, are they not supposed to have some minimum amount of evidence about the truth of a matter before they pass judgment.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
in here somewhere.. If I were smarter than the average laid-off IT guy, I could find it.. I gotta go hit munster.com for my job search now.
Is this going to harm or benefit the career of the judge? And suing the wrong company shouldn't invalidate the judgment?
Proof again that America no longer has a Justice system.
What it does have instead, is merely a "Legal" system.
The law IS an ass.
This sounds like a perfect opportunity for some lawyer to sue another lawyer.
Bring this up again when the use the DMCA for something useful.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
These default judgments for absurd amounts of money just show how broken our legal system is. If somebody doesn't show up to a court house for a lawsuit in the millions of dollars, it's probably because they weren't properly notified.
In fact, looking at thedirt.com, there's a posting about it on top of the page. The person seems as baffled and confused as the rest of us. The site looks like a random Wordpress blog tracking celebrity gossip, almost certainly a one-person operation with no budget or staff. The address on file for the domain is that of DomainsByProxy, and notice was probably never delivered to the actual site owner.
Did the judge ever consider that possibility before issuing an $11M default judgment against an individual? By simple inspection, one can see that Thedirt.com is very obviously not the product of a global mega-media-corporation with billions of dollars to sue for.
Why would you ruin someone's life without forcing proper process-serving and making sure the person or a lawyer for them show up? The civil system in the US needs to be torn apart and started again from scratch, or merged into the criminal system like in (some?) European countries.
I am confused about why the owners of TheDirt.com did not respond to the lawsuit. Wouldn't it have been a trivial matter to dismiss the suit, since it was filed against the wrong site?
Similar thing happened to me this week.
One of my websites got an 8 page letter from a large law firm in DC (http://www.Venable.com) on behalf of Verizon. Had all kinds of BS in it. All kinds of threats, examples, quotations from the CEO and gave 7 days to respond. The only problem was that there was supposed to be an S on the end of the domain name. They interchanged example.com and examples.com all through 8 pages apparently not knowing that there was a difference. I pointed it out and they said:
"Our researchers had reason to believe that your company was the one that had published the referred to in my letter. I take it from your response that this is not the case; my apologies for the unintentional confusion. "
My response was, "If you are going to sign your name to something, you better review who is doing the research for you" and included the relevant WHOIS info. If they had done a simple WHOIS lookup they would have found the correct company and then could have looked up the correct business address. I cc'd a bunch of the partners because dumb-asses like that need to be reined in.
It must happen all the time, and it is unbelievable that no one noticed the problem. The attorneys should be embarrassed and the Judge/Clerks/Court should be even more embarrassed to have awarded a default judgement against the wrong company.
And IAAL. Stupid.
- sue a website you've never heard of or ever visited.
- ????
- Profit!!
In the article, it says she was also an English teacher. Therefore you'd think she'd get the spelling of the site correct. Well... guess she's getting 11 million dollars, so why should she complain?
Which sounds reasonable until you realize that just responding to the allegation would cost thousands of dollars.
And it's not at all likely he would have been made whole by the judge.
Since it's all lawyers, there's no way the Judge would make the *lawyer* pay the other side's complete cost and sanction him.
Judges would rather ruin the defendant's life rather than put the lawyer's career at risk. His priorities are straight, apparently.
I recommend you immediately sue slashdots.org for this obviously unacceptable headline.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The whole thing about automatically losing any lawsuit you don't answer leaves open a big fat hole for you to get DDoS'ed by the legal system. Get enough summonses thrown at you and a few are bound to slip through the cracks.
I bet nothing comes of this. There are no deep pockets anywhere.
Maybe the lawyer and the judge were worried the sites were not safe for work. I know I sure am with names like TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com
If it isn't broke, tinker with it till it is!
ah so typical - seems to the average person that lawyers these days are more focused on making smash-and-grab quick money instead of upholding the law. This is basics and shouldn't really have slipped through the cracks - in my profession a mistake of this magnitude would see me (and those like me) out of a job.
Imagine Skynet's embarassment when the Terminator took out Sarah Jones.
Wow, and she is not even a blond. Wonder if the lawyer is.
The Binary Anti-Pattern [http://beyondboolean.blogspot.com/]
Shortly after moving to where I live now, I received a letter claiming thousands in hospital bills. The problem, I'd never been hospitalized, nor even seen the hospital listed.
In my case, I called the idiotic attorney's office.
The stupid paralegal (IE, "intern") had obviously just done a name search and picked me as the closest geographically. Then she had the audacity to request I fax her my social security card! LOL As if I'd let such a slipshod operation have my info.
So I'm not surprised at all, there's no way the woman would know the attorney pursued the wrong website. There's no way the court would know either, they can only deal with what information is brought to them.
There's a reason I personally handle my legal matters when I can.
If the court delivered the papers to the address in the WHOIS information, there might be a very good reason for 'TheDirt' to have NOT received them. The WHOIS address is a generic one that applies to thousands of people who don't want their home or business address accessible from WHOIS. It would be fairly easy for a summons to get lost in the mail if there is a lot of mail going through that address.
You could also run into a problem of the summons NOT being delivered in time, especially if the owner of the domain is on vacation or had moved and failed to update their behind the scenes WHOIS information.
What we need is more information about the delivery of the summons.
This original complaint is here in pdf format:
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/kentucky/kyedce/2:2009cv00219/62639/1/0.pdf
It is pretty funny to see them talking about "TheDirt.com" all through it when it isn't even the right website.
If I was the guy that had to pay this money I'd simply move to a different country. It's obvious that the one he is currently in is too retarded for him to stay.
Does this mean that you can sue just anyone for something that someone else allegedly did? Now we can all get rich fast!
no, I don't have a sig
welcome to amercia, where idiots live.
A better thing to do would be to point out that she presumably paid her lawyer quite a lot of money, and that incredibly expensive lawyer couldn't even been bothered to look at the end result before sending the documents out. Oh, no, some low-paid clerk did that...but I bet the lawyer billed as if he did.
She's the person who got scammed. I guess according to everyone else she should have paid for another absurdly expensive meeting with her lawyer to make sure he was actually doing his damn job? Or maybe only technically savoy people who can do whois lookups and whatnot can sue for libel on the internet, people who hire lawyers to figure that out when they run across a defamatory website just deserve to lose?
The real problem is the automatic assumption that her lawsuit was bogus, thanks to big business constantly painting lawsuits as such in an attempt to corrupt the only process that people can be made whole after corporations destroy them. She's a teacher who was falsely claimed to be sleeping with football players and having caught a venereal disease...it's entirely plausibly that her employment was actually harmed. Teachers are held to pretty strict moral standards, even previous cheerleaders.
But a more important problem is the fact that you can apparently file lawsuits against anyone in court and get a default judgment against them if they don't show up even if the facts are total nonsense. Not even 'imaginary' nonsense, where the case has no merit but the plaintiff pretends it does, but accidental nonsense, where everyone involved would agree the case has no merit if they bothered to look at it.
I understand that, if people don't respond to the court at all, they should lose any sort of logical case, but there should actually be some sort of sanity check on that case having some legal grounds.
For an example here, evidence is presented they are actually the person who owned the domain the stuff was posted on. 'Here is a printout of this URL, here is a whois of the domain'. Yes, if they don't show up, they couldn't challenge this 'evidence', but still there should actually be some evidence required.
The entire court system is more and more tilted to the large guy, who can hire lawyers and actually spend the time and money to operate within it. Here, of course, it was a 'little guy' who sued with a lawsuit that went wrong, so of course it's trumpeted far and wide to show of the 'system is broken' so the next time a little guy sues for being poisoned by a large company or defamed by a site publishing nonsense that ruins their reputation, it's just one of those 'crazy lawsuits'...but the whole 'default judgment' thing is a problem only against individuals, so no one ever talks about reforming that.
There needs to be an easier way to respond to the court, especially for people far away. There needs to be legal counsel available, for free, to people who are sued. Maybe not 'a lawyer', but at least some sort of collection of easy-to-understand printouts of the actual definitions of what they're being sued over, a diagram of the process, and what various options are, along with some templates of motions of dismissal and stuff.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Why should TheDirt waste their money, resources and time to defend something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. Yeah, it probably would have just been a 5 minute "You've got the wrong website" statement, but that's still money that they shouldn't have to spend. IANAL, but I doubt TheDirt could claim all of their costs back from this daft cheerleader - especially considering the ridiculous method that's used to calculate costs. It's kind of depressing that "innocent until proven guilty" goes out the window when they can shoot for "proven guilty in absence".
They should counter-sue/appeal/whatever-it-is the cheerleader into oblivion for slandering their website.
The jurors on the Gotse trial are in for a surprise.
Table-ized A.I.
Tell your IT people to make sure all your firm's web browsers print the URL in on the footer of the page by default. If you don't know what that means, your IT people will. If they don't, fire them. You're welcome.
This illustrates why many judges need to be taken out and shot.
The plaintiff made his court date.
The defendant did not.
There really isn't much the judge can do - there really isn't much that he has the legal right to do - but render a judgment for the plaintiff by default.
I was building a house years ago and a subcontractor *who did not work on the house* sued me because I didn't pay him (!!!!?????)
I contacted an attorney to deal with the lien, contacted the other attorney. Despite that, the plaintiff sued me in court. And just before it went before the judge, he offered to settle for $400 (he was asking for $10,000).
My attorney advised me to take the deal, because we were already $2,500 into depositions, and we had another 2 hours to wait for the judge. So it would have cost me $350 just to sit there to get to the judge ($175/hour).
So please spare me the bullshit about "just a call to the other lawyer". It cost me $3,000 to resolve something that *was a complete mistake*.
Yes, I could have gone to the judge, yes, we could have pursued the other lawyer and the sub contractor for malicious something-or-other... WHICH WOULD COST ME MORE MONEY.
It's all bullshit and you guys know it because lawyers hold the keys to the kingdom, they're expensive, and the judges and legislators are all lawyers, so they don't see the issue.
My theory is that you should be able to proceed against the defendant en absentia.
That way, you still have to satisfy your own burden of proof, and you can still prove your case and win even with a no-show. In this case, the defendant would only lose the opportunity to raise affirmative defenses.
And the attorney representing you still has to earn his pay.
Who apparently does not proofread her own papers.
The Los Angeles based group owns 'thedirt.com' while the Scottsdale, Arizona group owns 'thedirty.com' if I'm reading related articles correctly.
The complaint was delivered to an address in Los Angeles. Is there a chance that a 'we are not these people' type response went back to the plaintiff and was ignored or lost in transit?
A few people have suggested that a simple call to the plaintiff's lawyers would have been enough to diffuse things. Unfortunately, unless you have some backup to say that you have made said call, it can be ignored.
It would be interesting if the Los Angeles group did everything they could to point out that the wrong group was being sued and thought they had resolved the issue, only to find that it still went to court.
If they had responded by appearing in court, could the Los Angeles group have demanded that their expenses be paid because they were NOT the ones that owned the offending site?
I really suspect that failing to respond to the court summons would fuck up their chances of winning such a lawsuit. You can't really get a court to take seriously your demand of $$$ for being wrongly sued if you didn't even bother to give the plaintiff a damn phone call telling them that you were the wrong guy. It's just not a good faith attempt to solve the dispute.
Are you adequate?
If they had shown up, could they have demanded that the plaintiff pay for their expenses?
You're being very shortsighted about this. Let me explain.
The civil court system exists in order to peacefully mediate disputes between private parties and produce fair solutions to them. In societies that do not have a civil court system or a similar institution, such disputes must be resolved between the parties themselves. This often means violence. I.e., without courts, if Joe mistakenly believes that you took 10 of his goats, and no matter how much evidence you show him he continues to believe so, there's a good chance you're going to find yourself in a violent confrontation with Joe, and will have to defend yourself and your property.
So yeah, in our civil court system, any old Joe can raise a complaint against you, and you're compelled to respond and defend yourself, even if there are some pretty blatant errors in the complaint. This is a big drag, yes, but it sure beats having to be constantly prepared to respond to any old Joe trying to ambush and shoot you dead for an equivalently erroneous complaint.
Are you adequate?
This is absolutely the most perfect story ever. It has every single element necessary for complete entertainment.
You first argued that we should have a civil courts system where somebody who has been erroneously served as a defendant should be able to ignore the court summons. I answered with an argument that while that is not wonderful, it is a lot better than the realistic alternatives, which involve getting erroneously shot instead of erroneously sued.
Do you have something to respond to that, or are you just going to randomly rant at stuff that you don't really understand but pisses you off because somebody else like you has told you it should?
Are you adequate?
So, tell me, where's the judge's mistake?
Are you adequate?
I would presume this was done on contingency
Oh dear. You really didn't think that through did you TheLinks?
If they were properly served they did (maybe) but there seems to be a tendency for proper service to be documented incorrectly that is growing and growing.
Due to legal immunity, judges exist in a consequences-free moral vacuum.
I am stunned more judges and persecutors (who have the same immunity) are not shot each year. The main reason I stay far away from the court system.
That principle also works for the Pope.
If you write enough dirt, some key is bound to stick.
FTFY.
0h, wait...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
this happens all the time.
they'll just vacate the default judgment and go after the right party