- Forum Clout
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Case is eerily similar to Pats. A rich heiress reporter named Sulome Anderson was suing a small online publication for basically calling her a hack.
Its a long article, so here are the highlights:
Its a long article, so here are the highlights:
Sulome was making plans to file a million-dollar lawsuit blaming a couple of independent journalists from a small online publication for ruining her high-flying career.
In preparing her legal strategy, a clearly desperate Sulome decided to pin her case on the completely false allegation that The Grayzone supposedly controlled its own personal Twitter troll farm, and had thereby engaged in a “tortious conspiracy” to destroy her career.
She and her lawyer seemed to believe that this claim would prompt a judge to give her discovery, thus enabling her to prove a conspiracy that existed only in their overactive imaginations.
Sulome thus accused us of direct responsibility for weaponizing a random assortment of Twitter users, or “Joe Doe’s,” which mockingly branded her a CIA and/or Mossad agent, despite the fact that we had no acquaintance or affiliation with any of them. As the court noted in its opinion, we never actually made any such assertion about the plaintiff.
One of the anonymous accused “Joe Doe’s” went by the moniker “Time Traveling Russian Hacker,” a clearly tongue-in-cheek reference to the Russian collusion drama that had consumed official Washington in Cold War paranoia. Any level-headed observer would have chuckled at the account’s name, but for Sulome and her crack legal team, this account’s activity was serious enough to cite in their complaint as evidence of a nefarious conspiracy.
As absurd as Sulome’s complaint might have seemed, its implications for press freedom were grave. If validated by a judge, it would have set the stage for a tsunami of lawsuits that could have destroyed platforms like Twitter, making users liable for retweets (whether or not they were actually endorsing those positions) and for statements by random online strangers based on an alleged common ideology.
The District of Columbia Superior Court has rejected a frivolous, million-dollar lawsuit claiming libel, defamation, and tortious conspiracy filed by writer Sulome Anderson against The Grayzone’s editor Max Blumenthal and assistant editor Ben Norton.
Superior Court Judge Jackson went on to reject the allegation that formed the heart of Sulome’s legal assault: that we had engaged in a nefarious conspiracy to defame her with a collection of anonymous Twitter accounts with which we had no connection. If a judge had validated such an absurd claim, Sulome’s legal assault could have made social media users liable for tweets by anonymous users simply because they shared similar opinions or ideology.
In a statement to The Grayzone, our legal defenders at Hawgood & Moran Law described Sulome’s complaint as “a Trojan Horse that would have ended the free and open exchange of ideas on social media.”