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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!
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.
Sarah Jones beats her children and smokes crack in front of them while doing it. sue that
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think the judge should be allowed to just ignore the law that says, if a party refuses to defend itself in a lawsuit, they get a judgment against them? Do you think judges should just do what they want even if the law says differently?
If that is a part of the law, it should be changed so the judge has to at least check to see if there's some minimal evidence against the defendant. I mean, if 100 people filed 100 made-up lawsuits against someone, shouldn't the judge(s) at least check to make sure if there's at least some basic evidence before forcing an innocent party to respond or be considered guilty by default if they don't respond to all of them?
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
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.
Imagine Skynet's embarassment when the Terminator took out Sarah Jones.
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.
"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.
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.