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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Orthomom Wins Lawsuit!

Mazel Tov, Orthomom! (The link is to her post on her victory.)

Back in February*, Google was sued by Lawrence Public School board member Pamela Greenbaum to release the identity of Orthomom over supposed defamation on her blog, which was widely dismissed by anyone who reads Orthomom's blog as a bunch of garbage.

Today, the court agreed. And it did so with some punch:
  • In fact, none of Orthomom’s own statements uses the words bigot or anti-semite to characterize Greenbaum’s position.
  • the court further finds that Orthomom’s statements are not reasonably susceptible of a defamatory connotation.
  • Greenbaum’s defamation claim against Orthomom reduces to the insupportable assertion that Orthomom implied that Greenbaum is an anti-Semite merely because Orthomom disagreed with Greenbaum’s position on the use of public funding for a program that could have affected the Orthodox Jewish community.
Nice. Congratulations to Orthomom, and a nice protection of free speech and bloggers by the Court.

* Here's the history: Story breaks; Orthomom intervenes in suit; story is written about in local media; this blogger's later take on the subject; Orthomom places 'memo to quash'; and the actual hearing.

3 comments:

  1. Yay! I was rooting for Orthomom, so hooray!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am in full agreement. It's a great piece of news, and a great victory for constitutional rights.

    ReplyDelete