Um, is this legal?

[epchick]

Originally Posted by christiangirl

In answer to your question, that's definitely not illegal...unless it's untrue. If it's true, then the First Amendment could protect the group creator's right to publish that information. If it's not, then it becomes slander which is a subcategory of defamation and is punishable by law. The guy could take it to trial and even sue for damages if he lost his job because of the accusation or something similar. However, he'd have to provide concrete evidence that he's innocent in order to make the charge stick. Even so, if the group creator says she really was raped and honestly thought it was him she could still get off on a technicality. He would have to somehow prove that she knew what she was saying was false.


That's what I gathered from here: http://definitions.uslegal.com/s/slander/

You've got the right idea, except in this case it isn't slander, its libel. Slander is oral defamation, while libel is written.

If this guy decided to take it to trial he would have to prove "actual malice." If I can remember my Law of Mass Comm class correctly, the guy would have to prove that the creator of the group created the group without proper knowledge and didn't regard the validity of the information.

So he would have to prove that the creator of the group KNEW the information was false, but that they didn't care.

Actual malice is reeeeeeally hard to prove a lot of the time, especially the fact about knowing whether the information was actually true.