Libel Suit Over “Moldy Apartment” Tweet Dropped

Filing a defamation lawsuit can sometimes do more harm to a person’s reputation than good. There is a major, perhaps irreconcilable, paradox associated with such lawsuits: the purpose of the tort of defamation is to allow individuals to redeem their reputations when false statements are made about them. However, filing a defamation lawsuit almost always causes more people to become aware of the false statement than they would have otherwise.

We covered one notable instance of this last summer. To bring you up to speed, someone made an offhand tweet about her apartment having mold in it. The property management company sued her for libel. The news of this lawsuit quickly made the rounds on the Internet (presumably due to the novelty of a libel case arising from a tweet). The response to the lawsuit was almost entirely negative, and the original message that was the subject of the lawsuit was disseminated far and wide.

Clearly, if the plaintiff hoped to redeem its reputation, this lawsuit was not the best way to do it. Even if the court found that the statement was, in fact, false, the damage would already have been done. But they could still at least get a little bit of money out of it in the form of damages, right?

As it turns out, not so much. The case was just dismissed on the grounds that the complaint was too vague, and that the tweet amounted to “rhetorical hyperbole,” rather than a statement of fact.

Once again, this demonstrates the importance of treading lightly when it comes to defamation lawsuits. A defamation plaintiff has to seriously consider what their objectives are: do they want to redeem their reputation, or do they want compensation for the damage that’s already been done?

Courts operate under the fiction that a finding that a defamatory statement was false, and then awarding damages for harm that can be attributed to the false statement, makes a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit whole. But it really doesn’t. After all, you can’t un-ring a bell, and once a defamatory statement, no matter how false it is, has entered the public’s consciousness, they will always associate the statement with its subject, regardless of the outcome of a lawsuit.

In this case, the plaintiff got the worst possible outcome: the defamatory statement was spread way farther than it would have been had they not sued, and they ended up not even recovering any money from the defendant, probably wasting a great deal of time and money in the process. Oh, and everyone still thinks they have moldy apartments, even if they don’t.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: think before you sue!