The judge ruled the anonymous comments and emails were protected speech
Comments made by two ficitious Facebook accounts and anonymous emails sent to Beachwood officials are protected speech and the city and its police chief Katherine McLaughlin can not use subpoenas to try and identify the person behind the messages, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Andrew Santoli ruled this week in the defamation case filed last year.
account. Those, the city claimed, matched the language and punctuation of the fake Facebook accounts. Andrew Geronimo, director of First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, which filed motions in the case on behalf of one of the accounts, told Scene it's possible that McLaughlin cried defamation in order to strong-arm her alleged defamer into showing his or her face. One who might've beena disgruntled coworker, maybe even a fellow officer.
Indeed, ruling that the Facebook comments were of the"hyperbolic, provocative and often-crass style" brand of anonymous internet discourse and that the email, being directed to public officials, was simply alerting them to issues, Santoli wrote: “This court recognizes the potential for defamation plaintiffs to file retaliatory lawsuits simply to obtain the identities of their critics and, with that knowledge, effectively silence any further commentary or criticism from that individual.
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