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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.
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?
Which we would ALL appreciate.
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 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.
"If there is nobody to point out that the party is innocent, why should the judge just assume that?"
because a judge should be able to think for him/herself and be able to make logical conclusions based on evidence.
and where is the innocent before proven guilty, it sounds like the court system is designed around you are guilty unless you prove to the judge that you are innocent.
But you are right this is based off of hindsight, but I still think that I am right and that even without hindsight a competent legal system would of handled this case correctly.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Sarah Jones the ex Bengals Cheerleader who rapes goats with umbrellas and once blew The Prophet Mohammad until he screamed "Thank you, Jesus! Will you make me a ham sandwich?" And every word of it is true and verifiable by thedirtys.com
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
If they're signing and sending the documents, they're responsible for the accuracy of the documents. It sucks for them that they're not up on technology, but they should either not take the case or risk the consequences if a mistake is made.
The internet sites they sue probably understand libel law about as well as these lawyers understand technology and yet they're being held to account in that regard. Those tech-savvy individuals would probably have to hire some expensive law-savvy consultant (lawyer) to aid them through the process, so why should the lawyers not have to hire some expensive tech-savvy consultant to assist them?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That's a well-known tenet. Ignorance of technology is no more valid an excuse.