Hundreds who posted views on sex assault trial targeted in Tarrant suit

From what I understand from another forum is that there were severe defamatory statements. It had gone way beyond simple opinion in regards to the case. Here is just some of the claims of the posters.

Claims of illegal activity in the defendants law firm
Claims of the wife sleeping with other lawyers and added the various lawyers names.
Claims of using his status as an attorney to " do this to other women before".
Claims of the defendants having herpes
Claims of other illegal activity in regards to prostitution
Claims defendant's brother was a drug dealer
Claims defendants are involved in drug smuggling and dealing
Claims of defendant having homosexual relations
Claims defendants sexually assaulted dogs
Claims of them being serial rapists
Claims defendant sexually assaulted his daughter
Claims defendants were child molesters
Claims that the defendant's lawyer was having sexual relations with his wife
Posters making up extra events that allegedly took place in the assault

reply to post by toochaos4u


Im not sure if you are alowed to post a link to another forum (MOD ?), but are there sources of these "claims" on that forum that you can link here?

Where are they getting this information?

reply to post by greeneyedleo


Well these are just paraphrased claims of the actual claims which were more "descriptive". The other forum is kind of a crime research site. The actual original messages themselves are not on that site but, were sent to me via their own U2U to let me see whether it was just opinion or the posters did in fact break any law.

I can give you a link to the topix message board where some stuff appears and you can read where some of the replies were not deleted to the offending material though. That is if a mod approves.



[edit on 8/2/2009 by toochaos4u]

reply to post by loam


i believe(not alawyer but have had a few law classes) libel is when you say something about someone and it causes them a financial loss. slander is really just derogitory and causes humilition and hence defamation of charachter. technically you can say anything about someone as long as you can prove it is fact- but does not financially harm them unless true. ie- i do construction but am not allowed to go around defaming others just because i believe they rip people off- but if i can prove my allegations it is entirely in my rights to say so

reply to post by Xenophiles


well them, what about OJ Simpson?what i'm thinking is a lawyer moderating all thread driven web sites. that way any libel statements can be chopped before they are posted.
wouldn't that be wonderful????

[edit on 8-2-2009 by Spectre0o0]

reply to post by Xenophiles


Well, I'm getting ready to start a web site where people can post, comment about, nominate, and vote up/down nominated idiots. Public idiots. Politicians, corporations, individuals that have made the public light such as in news stories. All posts are copyright by the person that originated it. I've been thinking of this sort of thing for a while, and am working up a privacy policy with the inclusion of a subpoena clause that makes it clear that if the information is requested by subpoena, then, of course, the subpoena will be followed, and the information will be supplied. Also, only subpoena's issued by a United States court will be followed (I'm not going to be subject to crazy expectations of other countries judicial systems).

IMHO, the people became public figures when they hit the news, if only for a short while, and only for the story that was printed. If they are sucessfull, you can expect more of the same.

the TOPIX site allows anon posting. Sure they might track your IP address, but good luck getting a federal warrant to back-trace those IP's who posted on the date of the posting.

I post anon all the time on TOPIX. I am not scared.

reply to post by SpacePunk


go for it dude- i'll be one ofthe first to signup if you get it going. and sure many more will jump on board
we need to protest our rights anyway we can!!!

Originally posted by greeneyedleo

Originally posted by loam
reply to post by greeneyedleo

 

Voicing an opinion is not the same a perpetuating libel.

People on this site should think carefully about that.

Well that is true. But I have seem some slanderous things said about celebrities that im sure they could claim as libel. So is there now a chance this could happen to us all?

Like I said, im more afraid of regular citizens coming after me then the government.

Guess I will just have to keep my thoughts to myself on many issues. LOL

Well at least the libelous thoughts ;-)

.

I do not advocate Violence, so I will only say that everyone should find this Lawyer, and Judge, and beat them down with Nerf Bats.

Originally posted by toochaos4u
From what I understand from another forum is that there were severe defamatory statements. It had gone way beyond simple opinion in regards to the case. Here is just some of the claims of the posters.

Claims of illegal activity in the defendants law firm
Claims of the wife sleeping with other lawyers and added the various lawyers names.
Claims of using his status as an attorney to " do this to other women before".
Claims of the defendants having herpes
Claims of other illegal activity in regards to prostitution
Claims defendant's brother was a drug dealer
Claims defendants are involved in drug smuggling and dealing
Claims of defendant having homosexual relations
Claims defendants sexually assaulted dogs
Claims of them being serial rapists
Claims defendant sexually assaulted his daughter
Claims defendants were child molesters
Claims that the defendant's lawyer was having sexual relations with his wife
Posters making up extra events that allegedly took place in the assault

If that was only the case at hand, and if the aforementioned are documentable facts, then I can understand an Anti-Libel suit. However, just this past month there was a case involving a similar lawsuit, but over an individual having given a restaurant a negative review online. It IS getting carried away, regardless of this case.

[edit on 9/2/09 by neformore]

Originally posted by bigfoot1212
reply to post by loam

 

i believe(not alawyer but have had a few law classes) libel is when you say something about someone and it causes them a financial loss. slander is really just derogitory and causes humilition and hence defamation of charachter. technically you can say anything about someone as long as you can prove it is fact- but does not financially harm them unless true. ie- i do construction but am not allowed to go around defaming others just because i believe they rip people off- but if i can prove my allegations it is entirely in my rights to say so

Slander is saying negative, untrue statements about a person. Libel is making negative, untrue statements about a person in print.

Wow, think of all the people out there that have claimed the grandparents of the Anthony's were in on Caylee's murder. I've seen it all over the place.
At what point does conjecture on a famous case become libel? I don't KNOW.
I don't like this though. This is a dangerous ruling for freedom of speech.

Claims of illegal activity in the defendants law firm
Claims of the wife sleeping with other lawyers and added the various lawyers names.
Claims of using his status as an attorney to " do this to other women before".
Claims of the defendants having herpes
Claims of other illegal activity in regards to prostitution
Claims defendant's brother was a drug dealer
Claims defendants are involved in drug smuggling and dealing
Claims of defendant having homosexual relations
Claims defendants sexually assaulted dogs
Claims of them being serial rapists
Claims defendant sexually assaulted his daughter
Claims defendants were child molesters
Claims that the defendant's lawyer was having sexual relations with his wife
Posters making up extra events that allegedly took place in the assault

Who cares?!?!?!

I can't *snip* BELIEVE these people are trying to sue hundreds of people over what they said anonymously online. Why the hell does it matter to them? Just get on with your life, change you name if you have to, it would cost less than all these trials will cost.

Wow, I just can't believe these people.

====
Mod Edit: Profanity/Circumvention Of Censors – Please Review This Link.


[edit on 2/9/2009 by Badge01]

I say, try and sue me for things I have said on here. Go ahead! Ill laugh all the way through the proceeding as I force them to read out every single post I have made here.

By the time they get through with all 5,731+ posts I have made on this site I think they will drop whatever lawsuit they have.

Good luck with that lawsuit.

Originally posted by solarstorm
Interesting how an ATS Forum Moderator or Site Owners have yet to make statements about this. How about a few words?

[edit on 8-2-2009 by solarstorm]

Mmmkay. My turn.

I was (and am) one of the head wizards on an internet Muck. We were involved in several court actions (two complaints of pedophilia, one involved the then-"communications decency act.") and I got to be "point man" on them (lucky me) because I knew folks in the law enforcement community.

Frankly, it's a tricky issue. From OUR standpoint, we had to go through endless logs (200k of text chat ...drivel...) and backsearch to see if there was any merit in ANY of the claims. Then we had to decide if the people contacting us had legal jurisdiction to file the case ... and had to decide if the people contacting us were indeed the Real Authorities and not someone "messin' with us" (that happened before).

And then we talked to a lawyer (I talked to several) to find out just what responsibilities we had.

In the two pedophile cases, we found evidence on our servers of stalking and harrassment. In the CDA case, we convinced the lawyers that we were not part of the chain of evidence (thankfully our Terms of Service covered our fannies on that one.)

So... bottom line... these cases are very difficult to deal with and involve lots of issues such as the rules of the site and the rules of the state AND country where the server is hosted as well as the rules of the state where the site owner lives. You can't simply say "we do this" as a blanket case (one case involved a woman's lawyer (in Australia) talking to us about her ex-husband harassing and stalking her through the Muck (he was in Canada, our server was in Wisconsin, and I (point man again) was in Texas and the site owner was in New York.)

As to "can people harass and stalk through the Internet", the answer is "yes." These issues are actually as old as Fidonet (and Compuserve networks... so we're talking about 1980) and (blanket, general statement) most site owners act to protect the group against attacks from outside as well as acting to prevent members from harming others by nasty emails, spam, and other means.

There's a hidden culture on the Internet of administrators. Most of us are admins (or have been admins) on many other sites, and we've all got horror stories of how some nice person was harmed by a nasty person. Many early (1980's, 1990's) admins had the attitude that it was "just words" and that the complainer should "grow up and get on with life". That attitude usually lasted until the admin ended up as Just Another Person on another site and had their first run-in with a very unreasonable person.

Eh... I could go on and on and on about this.

I feel the site should have taken some proactive measures, as most news sites do nowadays. In general comments are screened before being released and if a story generates a lot of nasty remarks, many news sites will close the comment section for that story after awhile.

Originally posted by TXRabbit
the TOPIX site allows anon posting. Sure they might track your IP address, but good luck getting a federal warrant to back-trace those IP's who posted on the date of the posting.

I post anon all the time on TOPIX. I am not scared.

News flash: If they really wanted to, they could.

I'm speaking from an administrator's point as someone who HAD to do that (in this case we had someone committing suicide by overdosing themselves and there were four of us on the hunt to find the person's location and then convince the police we were the real admins and this wasn't a hoax.)

Anyone can backtrack an IP. You just have to know which Internet tools to use.

reply to post by Byrd


Thanks Byrd for weighing in on this!

Im sure our legal system and the laws created, never saw this issue coming.

I wonder if new laws will be written or old laws revised due to our online world now.

reply to post by Byrd

I got to be "point man" on them (lucky me) because I knew folks in the law enforcement community.

No they used you, cause you could walk into the courtroom, destroy the oppositions argument with logic and reason then walk out again.

Ive read your posts.