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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

> Captions in the YouTube video that the counterclaim quoted read that [...] Galanakis had been “kidnapped then raped by the NPD all night.”

> In two decisions in May and September, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher dismissed almost all of the officers’ claims. Locher deemed most of Galanakis’s captions as “non-actionable statement[s] of opinion” or “rhetorical hyperbole,” which are both considered non-defamatory. This included the caption where Galanakis said he was “raped” by the police department, which Locher said was “distasteful,” but non-actionable.

False claim of rape is distasteful but non-actionable? I don't get that.

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It's rhetorical. If you said said "the Denver Broncos raped the 49ers last night" you wouldn't be accusing the Broncos of literal sexual assault.

There's a clear contextual difference between a ball game and a bogus arrest. In the latter, he was deprived of his freedom and placed at the mercy of the police with few if any witnesses.

I think there is a non zero chance that big brute of an officer would have raped him in the era before body cams and ubiquitous surveillance

Most likely because these were captions on the cops' bodycam footage, so viewers who watched it probably did not get any impression that he was claiming to be literally raped.

"raped by the NPD all night" seems to clearly reference (evidently fictitious) off-camera events.

Yeah, no. In the context, it's an obvious hyperbolic metaphor. Nobody was meant to believe that it referred to real rape, no reasonable viewer would have believed that, and most likely nobody did believe that.

HN user strathmeyer seems to believe it.

I don't think you are reading that the same way most others here would.

Wait until you hear about all the kids who claimed to have raped me on Xbox Live during my childhood.

Xbox live rape claims are obvious hyperbole because neither party was ever in the physical presence of the other. In this case it's different, because the accuser was arrested by the police so the police did have the opportunity to rape him. Since that opportunity actually existed, I don't think the claim is obvious hyperbole.

I think nobody would believe the claim in the context of xbox live, but many people are inclined to believe it in the context of an unlawful arrest. Even one of the replies to my first comment about this seems to believe the claim. (He's now been flagged for this. What guideline did he violate? I hope he wasn't flagged because his perspective lends credence to my perspective that accusing cops of raping you after a baseless arrest is not obvious hyperbole.)

And our poor mothers!

It wasn't a "false claim of rape". It was, at worst, distasteful hyperbole.

from my perspective, he used rape as hyperbole to describe general harassment... it's incredibly distasteful, but you'll hear something like "your team got raped" as a barb in sports or gaming

> False claim of rape is distasteful but non-actionable?

This is a result of the 1st amendment. Sometimes it's both.

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