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."

Comments

Re:What TheDirt.com should do

[metalmaster]

It says the reward was, in part, because the owner failed to respond(no showing a court date is bad) so its not really a case for libel.

this just in

[uncanny]

Sarah Jones beats her children and smokes crack in front of them while doing it. sue that

Default judgements

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Re:Default judgements

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Improper notification is an allowable defense to get the judgment overturned. Normally before a judge renders a summary judgment, they ask whether the defendant was notified. Now if the plaintiff lies then they are in more trouble than an overturned verdict. Assuming that TheDirt.com was not properly notified, then a judge will hear the case again.