Book Author Sues Reviewer

I'm not sure whether this is what the newspaper business calls a man-bites-dog story. Such a tale (or tail) depends on someone doing something you just wouldn't expect. Of course, most book authors probably harbor desires to sue for a bad review - and that's on their good days. (Imagination on the bad days tends toward more graphic and inventive violence.) So I was a bit surprised to read this BoingBoing post about a blogger who saw the subject of a negative review head right to court. As the post quotes the blogger:

He claims to have a revolutionary idea for how evolution works, but his ideas have no connection to reality, and these lovely elaborate drawings he made look nothing at all like actual embryos. The bottom line is that I said his work was more about the evolution of balloon animals than biology.

Obviously this is proof positive that Darwin was nuts and that the fittest aren't necessarily the ones surviving.

Lee Kaplan Post Comment Deconstruction and Moderation

I eventually put my food related blog on comment moderation. I didn't like anonymous remarks that had all the signs of up-beat marketing talk appearing in response to a couple of my product reviews. If you want to disagree, that's fine, but you've got to say who you are and make a case.

I've just had to do the same with this blog. A comment came in about my Small Claims Court Becomes SLAPP Slip post. It's tone made it sound like it was either from Kaplan himself or some partisan supporter. That's fine, but how about attaching your name to the post, Anonymous? Are you afraid to stand up for what you say? Apparently so, and I took down the post. But I don't like the idea of censoring, so I'm putting in here along with an examination.

Erik Sherman writes from total ignorance in the Salahi vs Kaplan case.

I was actually writing more about how small claims might circumvent a state's anti-SLAPP legislation, and this is an area I've researched in the past.

First, Salahi write demonstrably false information on the Internet to attack Kaplan's professional reputation as a journalist, a tort.

Writing something that is demonstrably (please use the spell checker) false about someone could be a tort. Did the writer think that the information was correct? Did the writer back up the work with research, repeat a rumor, or make something up with the interest of doing damage? A court would have to decide in such a situation whether there had been a tort.

Salahi sent threatening emails and made phone calls to Kaplan's employers that cost Kaplan a job.

First, Kaplan appears to be a freelance writer, so he has clients, not employers. Second, according to the links that Anonymous provides (more on this later), Kaplan nearly lost a client. Nearly to me means didn't. Furthermore, one of the links that goes into this makes it pretty muddy exactly what caused the problem for Kaplan - sorry, but on multiple readings, I couldn't figure out what he was saying, other than it had something to do with a switch of images, accompanying an article Kaplan wrote, somewhere or other.

Salahi claims his free speech was curtailed, yet says he will continue to libel Kaplan on the Web and that nobody told him he had to take the smear site he set up against Kaplan down.

Yes, Salahi claims that the suit has made it more difficult to express himself, which is why I wrote about this as a potential case of small claims courts possibly being a new way for people and companies to try using legal tactics to control speech. Possibly is the operative word here.

So wheres the violation of the First Amendment?

I never said that there was a violation of the First Amendment. That would require a government body restricting speech. The term First Amendment doesn't appear in the body of my post. It is a label for the post, because it's a free speech issue, and someone looking for First Amendment topics might find this interesting.

Salahi is asking the blogging community to pay the judgment for him, but why should they.

I don't know, as I never said that they should. In fact, I never even mentioned that he was looking for people to donate money.

His crying about the First Amendment is a con to get sympathy and donors.

A con? And just how do you prove that he doesn't believe what he's writing? He'd have to for this to be a con. Don't rant about people libeling others on the web and then do exactly what you complain about.

As for the SLAPP nonsense, it did not apply to the case.

SLAPP nonsense? Sorry, but there are too many cases where law suits have become instruments to silence people. The question was whether Kaplan took action because he really felt injured or did so to silence a critic. I can't know that for sure, but it's certainly a possibility. Now go back and see at the beginning of my post where I wrote that this case may be one of the latest to get around anti-SLAPP restrictions.

Salahi had free legal help and it was Kaplan who had to bear the brunt of his own lawsuit.

Hello, this was small claims court. I assume that Anonymous meant that Kaplan had to bear the costs of his suit. The cost to file for a $7,500 claim (which happens to be the largest that the court allows) is $75. Sorry, but that doesn't seem to be an overwhelming amount, and as you can't bring a lawyer into the court, that limits the amount of the legal bill. In other words, his costs were minimum and he was going for the largest amount of damage - and most painful penalty - he could while minimizing his own expenses.

By the way, it was proven in court that Salahi lied about the SLAPP motion that he mistakenly claimed he could use a year ago.

Oh? Lied? An interesting assertion without any proof cited. And what is it that Anonymous means? Lied about raising it? Try collecting yourself and thinking through what it is that you want to say, please.

The article attacking Kaplan was written by an anti-Israel rag and reporter that has done hit pieces on Kaplan before, and has nothing to do with the court case or the evidence.

Ah, I see - Anonymous doesn't like the presumed politics of the article's publisher. But this is empty rhetoric, as it doesn't show one way or the other that what was in the article was inaccurate. A critical view isn't necessarily a "hit piece," which sounds as though it's written strictly to discredit someone and not to investigate a story. Those who are interested can actually see Kaplan's own response to the article in question. While he does refute a number of things, I don't think he refuted the part about disrupting events.

See:
www.leekaplandeconstructsleekaplanwatch.blogspot.com and
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28816 to get the real story...

Ah, now we get to the nub of it. The two sources were written by Kaplan, and Anonymous is a true believer. Reality suggests that in any dispute, the truth is generally somewhere between the two sides.

Now, to be fair, I realize that I inadvertently left out half a line from my previous post. The second to the last sentence should have started, "If this representation is correct..." I don't know what Kaplan actually does because I haven't been there and, frankly, am not interested in doing the amount of research on him that it might take to establish its veracity. But if this is how he acts, then it does sound like he wants to drown out opposing views.

Small Claims Court Becomes SLAPP Slip

A SLAPP - strategic lawsuit against public participation - is a mechanism that many people use to stifle public criticism or debate by using the legal system as a weapon. When the critics have to spend too much time or money defending themselves, they can't afford to keep speaking their minds. Some states, like California, have statutes giving the defendant a way of challenging the motives of the suit. But companies and individuals keep trying to find ways of circumventing the statutes, and one of the latest attempts may involve California's small claims courts.

Berkeley sophomore Yaman Salahi started a blog called Lee Kaplan Watch, following the work of a journalist by that name. Kaplan ended up suing him for libel in small claims court - a fairly unusual move. And apparently he's been ordered by the court to pay $7,500 in damages. Under California law, small claims judges aren't required to file written opinions, so it's difficult for Salahi to find grounds to challenge the decision. Oh, and the same day the judgment came out, Kaplan applauded a writer's U.S. court victory in a libel case because a $120,000 UK judgment could have bankrupted her and effectively kept her from speaking her mind. Ah, the irony. And here's an article about Kaplan's relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflicts and pro-Palestinian voices in the U.S.:

The self-appointed watchdog of the Bay Area's pro-Palestinian groups, he has made it his mission in life to disrupt their events, confront their leaders, and reveal them to the world as he sees them. He uses tactics that others call extreme, and he calls necessary: He has infiltrated their conferences and gone in disguise to their training sessions, with tape recorder and hidden camera. When his foes are college students, he calls their deans. When they're Jewish, he contacts their families. Kaplan acknowledges that such tactics won't resolve any conflicts, here or abroad, but he doesn't believe that compromise is possible with the current pro-Palestinian groups.

If this representation is correct, then, in other words, free speech is fine - if it's "correct" free speech. Didn't Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia have similar approaches?

[Edited to explicitly acknowledge that I can't know if the article about Kaplan is correct in what it states.]