Judge Rules in Tale of a Soured Love Affair as Told on Anonymous Blogs

New York: For all the inquiries they have facilitated into humanity’s highest intellectual realms, blogs have also proved themselves good incubators for petty squabbling, savage back-stabbing and ad hominem warfare of all varieties. The same, of course, is true of academia. So if, as a recent lawsuit alleges, an editorial associate at Cornell University’s Sage School of Philosophy took to the Internet in 2012 to savage a former lover, it may not be surprising that things got out of control.

The accusations — too scabrous to be reprinted here — were spread around dozens of websites, including in anonymous blogs and professional ratings sites. They excoriated every supposed aspect of the man’s identity, from his sexual proclivities to his physical endowment to his professional ethics to his ex-wife and disabled child.

John B. Wender, the architect who was the subject of those accusations, filed a lawsuit for $1.25 million (Dh4.59 million) last year against Louise Silberling, a woman he said he had met online and gotten together with three times, citing a “malicious campaign to utterly destroy plaintiff’s personal and professional reputation.”

Silberling offered a three-pronged defence: The postings were just matters of opinion; they exceeded the statute of limitations; and, by the way, she did not write them.

This month, a judge dismissed much of Wender’s defamation suit, saying that 25 of the 31 statements in question were expressions of subjective opinion.

“A statement is defamatory if it is false and ‘tends to expose the plaintiff to public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace,’” Justice Anil C. Singh of state Supreme Court in Manhattan wrote.

“Opinions cannot be proven untrue,” the judge continued, “and they are constitutionally protected.” The statements against Wender were withering, the judge agreed, but according to an earlier case, “loose, figurative or hyperbolic statements, even if deprecating the plaintiff, are not actionable.”

In line with other rulings, the judge said that people took anonymous web comments with a grain of salt.

“No reasonable reader of these perfervid postings would construe the statements” as fact, the judge wrote of a diatribe about Wender on LiarsCheatersRUs.com.

Only two types of the statements were deemed actionable: negative reviews of Wender’s work that purported to be written by former clients, and the first paragraph of a long essay, signed in Wender’s name, purporting to confess all his myriad moral shortcomings. The rest of the essay was disallowed.

As overheated as the quoted passages may be, Lucy A. Dalglish, a lawyer who has defended libel cases and who is dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, said the ruling was within the mainstream.

“It’s a fairly routine libel suit. Unfortunately, people do this to each other all the time.”

Silberling’s lawyer, Jared M. Lefkowitz, applauded the ruling.

“The case has been pretty well decimated,” he said. “There’s pretty few of the allegations left and we’ll be addressing them as we go forward.”

Wender’s lawyer could not be reached for comment Friday.