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Defamation of a public figure requires knowing that the statement was false, or reckless negligence of the truth.

Defamation of a non-public figure requires negligence of the truth.

Assuming the cop can be considered a non-public figure they would need to prove that the statement was made without a lot of consideration for the truth.

Given there is nuance here as to the details of the case it is going to be hard to win a defamation case here.

A layperson misunderstanding the difference between a court order and a conviction likely isn't enough to justify damages.

Smells of using the courts to punish someone by forcing them to lawyer up.

> Smells of using the courts to punish someone by forcing them to lawyer up.

Though the publicity seems to be making it backfire for the police. I can imagine him getting a pro-bono lawyer based on the publicity. And the details of the protective order leaking out, etc. Streisand effect.

Yeah, I would imagine ACLU or EFF would pick this up for free.

This fits an old adage of cops, "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."

This is what that means, it's common for cops to punish people by simply forcing them to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to beat charges they know won't stick. DAs go along with it because they know cops can destroy their career if they stop providing cases/evidence.

I love how you imply that the only time DAs participate in gratuitous punishment of citizens is when cops threaten their careers.

I don't think they implied that's the only time a DA would do that, just why they would maybe do it in this situation.

Why would a DA want a case that can be beat or dismissed? At best it's more work taking away time for real cases, and it's possibly a defeat if it goes to far, which they definitely don't want. All to punish someone the DA has no reason to care about because it wasn't even anything to do with the DA's authority or the authority of their job?

A corrupt DA might knowingly prosecute an innocent person if they think they can make it stick because winning a car is good for thrm, but why would they go out of their way to do something possibly detrimental without reason?

Well the reason could be doing the police a favour because you like them just as easily as doing it because they've threatened you.

I guess if the DA is worried about the police punishing them by not supplying you good cases, or whatever else, enough to give in to that then it's kind of irrelevant whether they would also want to do the favour anyway for a cop they liked (or just for the principle of supporting your crime-fighting sibling agency) or not. But it's possible that a DA who feels confident that the police wouldn't treat them differently in the future if they said no (or who didn't care about that threat) might still say yes for the different reason of thinking that police always need backing up / that if they disliked this guy enough to fuck with him then it must be because the guy deserves it.

Yes, but outlining one way in which DA's might feel pressured to do what the police prefer even if it's not strictly supported by the law does not "imply that the only time DAs participate in gratuitous punishment of citizens is when cops threaten their careers". It only implies that's one way or reason why they might do that.

That may seem pedantic, but I think it's very important when it comes to having useful and rational discussions. If anyone isn't seeing that, replace "DA" with a minority if your choice and "gratuitous punishment of citizens" with any other negative behavior, like theft or crime, and try to explain what the difference is between the statements. If we can't follow the same rational when assessing behavior of groups we have favorable or unfavorable predisposed opinions towards, then we can't even discuss effectively.

You don't need to convince a pig to roll in mud.

Thanks for this simple and thourogh answer

Defamation requires negligence (if the plaintiff is not a public figure) or actual malice (if the plaintiff is a public figure). In every case you'll ever hear about, the plaintiff is a public figure, and I don't doubt the police officers will be ruled public figures here.

Actual malice in the legal sense has nothing to do with the regular meaning of those words in English. It instead requires that the defamer have seriously entertained doubts about the truth of the statements, and published them anyways.

In this case? I'd have a hard time finding them defamatory were I on the jury. One of the statements is alleging that the cop is a "convicted" domestic abuser, where the truth is that he has a protective order placed against him in relation to alleged domestic abuse yet has never been charged nor convicted. Another statement is alleging that the cop is "on the slow spectrum" on social media, which--honestly, I'm surprised the judge didn't toss that on motion to dismiss, it's pretty clearly typical hyperbolic puffery.

> Actual malice in the legal sense has nothing to do with the regular meaning of those words in English. It instead requires that the defamer have seriously entertained doubts about the truth of the statements, and published them anyways.

How is that different from the ordinary English meaning? Or does American English differ from British English in this regard?

From the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:

"the intention to do something wrong and esp. to cause injury: "

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malice

All it takes to get a protective order is a allegation.

It is a common tactic that women use in divorce to file false domestic abuse or child abuse claims. It's called a "silver bullet divorce". Unfortunately abuse of the legal system like this has made it necessary to be skeptical of claims of domestic abuse without evidence.

Sure, there's actually a chasm of difference between a protective order and a full criminal conviction. That's enough to meet the falsehood requirement of defamation.

However, to demonstrate actual malice, you have to demonstrate that the defendant knew of just how different the two things were, which is frankly a pretty tall ask.

> However, to demonstrate actual malice, you have to demonstrate that the defendant knew of just how different the two things were, which is frankly a pretty tall ask

If I was a defendant in such a thing, I'd point to numerous cases where police departments have claimed, and courts have agreed, that police are not expected to be experts on the law.

"If law enforcement officers can be held by the court to not have to have a nuanced understanding of the law, how could I possibly?"

A comparison is not relevant. The threshold is whether or not the person making the claim knew, independent of anything anyone else in the world does or doesn't know, and the burden is on the other side to prove that they did.

That's a little reductive. If that were so, there'd barely be a need for defense in our criminal system, just "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you've heard the prosecution's case - do you believe they've established guilt?". Instead, regardless of the ostensible burden, statements like this by the defense work to erode any claims of "beyond reasonable doubt".

You're conflating the civil and criminal judicial systems when the reality is they're quite separate, and defamation has its own special corner of the civil realm where plaintiffs have a very steep hill to climb.

The protective order in this case is from a former girlfriend.

That isn’t necessary. Iowa has no-fault divorce.

They don't have no fault child custody though, which IMO is a most important part of the divorce. In practice by far the biggest money prize in a higher income divorce is a big child support award, and there you want to fault the spouse as much as possible to turn your kid into a cash cow to "maintain living standards" while in your disproportionate custody.

You might get away with claiming that "convicted" was a mistake, or with claiming that you thought the restraining order was essentially the same thing (it's not; in some places those orders can be issued almost without even being requested). But you'd be on a lot firmer ground if you walked it back as soon as you were corrected.

However, when you get to the point of specifically say the guy "beat the shit out of" his ex-girlfriend, you'd better have a good reason for believing that. Or if you have an iffy reason, you better say what the reason is, not just state the conclusion as fact. It sounds like the kid had no idea what was actually going on.

A restraining order for domestic abuse being referred to as "best the shit out of" sounds like a pretty bog standard simplification to me. After all colloquially how else do you define domestic abuse?

Exaggerating for emphasis doesn't usually qualify for negligence.

When I legally separated from my ex-wife in California, as I recall we had to check a box not to get restraining orders. Otherwise restraining orders would have been issued, I think against both of us, without either one even having to make any claim about any abuse or any risk thereof. Check the wrong box, automatic restraining order.

That may not be what's meant by "protective order", but at a minimum you should be able to get a protective order against somebody who, for example, threatened violence without actually doing it. That might be evidence of a bad temper or bad judgement or just general assholeism, but that is a long, long way from "beating the shit out of" somebody. Well out of "emphasis" range.

On edit: Oh, and really you could get the order just by saying that the person threatened you, whether they really did or not. So the order is really only proof that there was an allegation, not even so much as a nasty word.

Negligence of the truth is the standard.

Being wrong is not sufficient for a defamation case.

All of these mistakes make the statement wrong and not factual but that isn't enough for a defamation case.

My point is if it was a simple mistake or misunderstanding that is enough to prove it wasn't negligence.

Verifying a article about the thing existed while misrepresenting that thing is likely not negligence unless that misrepresentstion was extreme.

Certainly "killed his girlfriend" would be negligent but if you misunderstood the thing in a minor way that isn't negligence just because you are wrong.

(To be clear the statement was certainly objectively false for multiple reasons)

So you're saying that a reasonable person similarly situated to this 19-year-old might be sure enough that "is under a protective order" equals "beat the shit out of his girlfriend" that they would allege the latter in public without further verification?

... and it's not a "minor" misunderstanding. The accusation is grave and the distinction is at the center of it.

Do you know how defamation laws work in the US?

Would you assume a viral video contained accurate descriptions of legal procedures?

Heck if he hadn't said convicted it would be protected speech. The US protects "I bet you X beats his wife".

Yes, I do. And while the US protects "I bet you X beats his wife", it does not protect "X beats his wife".

And "accurate descriptions of legal procedures" have nothing at all to do with the most serious allegation. The serious allegation is the beating, not the conviction.

I don't know exactly what the kid said, and the case is probably going to turn on really close parsing of both his words and the manner and context in which he presented them.

If he baldly said "this guy beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he made a statement of fact. Not a statement of opinion. Not "from what he did to me, he seems like the type". Fact. Even if the cop had truly been convicted of, say, battery as part of domestic abuse, the kid would have had no way of knowing exactly what that battery consisted of. Saying the cop had "beaten the shit out" of his girlfriend would still have been speculation on the kid's part, regardless of any conviction, let alone a protective order.

There are no complicated legal technicalities there. The kid had no knowledge of the detailed facts of the domestic abuse case, and he knew he had no knowledge of the detailed facts. He wasn't only ignorant of the legal finding. He was ignorant of what actually happened.

It is negligent to present your speculations as facts. Negligence means not exercising the care expected of a reasonable person in a similar situation. Pulling something out of your ass and presenting it as true is not reasonable care. It was done in a video after the fact. He had time to reflect, so there's no possibility of mistake "in the heat of the moment". And there's no "I did it because I'm an idiot" escape from being found negligent, either. People are often negligent because they're idiots.

Now, if he had said "the cop was convicted of domestic abuse, which I assume must mean that he beat the shit out of his girlfriend", then he would have been presenting a reason for his conclusion. In that case, so long as didn't suggest that that wasn't his only reason, the truth of the conclusion would cease to matter. He wouldn't be considered to be presenting "the cop beat his girlfriend" as fact; he'd be presenting it as an inference to be drawn from the fact of the conviction. Then the audience would be expected to be able to make their own determination about whether that inference followed from the presented fact.

At that point, the question would be whether the kid was negligent in claiming that there was a conviction, because that would be the actual statement of fact he'd be offering. You might get away with claiming that was a mistake, but before you get there you have to show that he made it clear to the audience that the "conviction" was the reason he said that the cop had "beaten the shit out of" his girlfriend.

Then you'd have to argue that he couldn't be expected to know the difference between a restraining order and a conviction. Which is still not exactly open and shut, because a reasonable person might go find out before publishing a video like that. Not taking that reasonable care might make the statement about the conviction negligent and therefore defamatory. Because in fact reasonable people a lot younger than 19 tend to know the difference. A complete moron is not a reasonable person.

Or he could have done both: "The cop beat the shit out of his girlfriend, and of course that led to his being convicted". In which case there'd be two statements of "fact", each of which could be considered separately.

Feel free to research this legal topic at all, if you are going to talk that much about it.

Including the definition of reasonable person, negligence, as well as the tests involved in a defamation suit.

>After all colloquially how else do you define domestic abuse?

The article doesn't mention what she got the protective order for, and there are several possible reasons that do not involve any physical abuse. Even domestic abuse does not necessarily mean he beat her.

Defamation required negligence.

They were certainly wrong about the situation and I would agree by quite a bit.

My point is misunderstandings don't mean defamation alone.

Looking at the document about protective orders that Iowa distributes, it seems like protective orders in Iowa are not some casual thing. They require court hearings and can't be filed against random strangers (like that Letterman incident referenced elsewhere in this thread.)

https://www.iowacourts.gov/browse/files/1c1d1ecd62dc41a78794...

These hearings have extraordinarily low evidentiary standards and are a complete joke.

A TPO/EPO will be issued based on any believable story, a PPO will be issued if you can use Photoshop.

Well, it's now much more likely that we're going to get the story. :-)

One thing I wonder about is if the plaintiffs thought about what this could end up meaning for them during discovery if they go forward with the suit. My understanding is that since evidence and statements around this would be central to the case and relavant to the truthfulness of the teen's claim or the teen's belief in it that he should be able to use that as part of his defense too. That could make any potential criminal trial more difficult for the cop since anything revealed here wouldn't be sealed or otherwise restricted as part of the public record.

> Does defamation require the person to knowingly spread false information?

IANAL but there are certain criteria that must be met from what I understand. Knowing the statements to be false is one of them, but then there is intent and motivation as well as actual damages.

The reason that intent matters is that I could say something like: "Jeff Bezos is the type of guy that murders cats for fun."

The above is an opinion that is using colourful language. However, it COULD be construed as a statement of fact. So if Jeff Bezos* wanted to sue me for defamation, he would have to make the case that I was making a statement of fact which I not only knew to be untrue, but that I also knew was likely to cause reputational harm that would lead to financial damages.

* - And I'm asking to put aside the fact that Bezos is a public figure which raises the bar even higher, since people are more likely to talk about public figures and thus it is more likely and reasonable to get the facts wrong, to share personal opinions in ways that could be confused as factual statements and it is much less likely to cause the individual damages since most reasonable people kind of "get" this.

In the US, you can get hit for defamation even of a public figure if you made the statement with "reckless disregard for its truth or falseness". You don't have to know for sure that it's false. Either knowingly lying or "reckless disregard" is "actual malice".

Private citizens need to prove actual malice to collect punitive damages, but mere negligence is enough for compensatory damages. That's for knowledge about the statement itself; I'm not sure what you have to know or intend about how much damage you'll do.

That's constitutional standards; there may be state-to-state variations that impose more conditions.

On edit: corrected; even for a non-public figure, it needs to be negligently false, so having taken reasonable steps to verify it should immunize you. But of course this kid clearly did not do this.