Johnny Depp asked to resign from Fantastic Beasts series after court loss, #3 delayed

[JWeinCom]

padib said:

JWeinCom said:

Amber's lawyer is really bad. It might be just because she got stuck with a shit case and has to pull at weird strings, but she's not coming off well.

 Even if he wants to, he can't. It's an op-ed, so it's clear that Washington Post is not the speaker, they're the publisher. As such, they're not held liable for the speech (in most cases). They are effectively just saying "Amber Heard said this". Or in this case, not even that, they're directly publishing her speech. Unless they claimed to have confirmed it or something, there would be no case here.

Moreover even if we ignore that, Johnny Depp is a public figure, so to be sued for libel, he would have to show that the defamatory statements were made maliciously. (NYTimes v. Sullivan) Either that they knew them to be false, or that they had reckless disregard for the truth. Even if it was false, first hand testimony from the person who allegedly suffered the abuse is definitely going to be enough for them to show that they were not reckless. With firsthand testimony, they would probably be considered to have done their due diligence. In most cases like this, nobody except the direct participants will know exactly what happens, so if you need to personally verify the facts, no victim of abuse can ever speak about it on any platform.

So, I'm close to 100% sure they can not be sued. Nor should they be. I get the argument that they platformed what, based on what I've seen so far, seem to be lies. But, if you allow that lawsuit, then effectively, you hold any news/media outlet 100% accountable for every person they put on their show, let write an op-ed, interview, or so on. A rule that you cannot publish the words of anyone else without becoming directly liable completely guts free speech. Makes much more sense to allow a lawsuit against the person who is actually lying.

And I'm not sure the op-ed on its own is defamatory. It doesn't mention Depp by name, although you could make a good case that it was sufficiently clear without that. The issue is that what she's saying is that she's a victim of abuse, and her abuser was protected by people in power. Again, you need to meet the actual malice standard, so you have to show that she knew that to be false. If she genuinely viewed herself as a victim of abuse, even if no reasonable person would agree, then you don't really have a case against her based on that alone. If you're trying to make a case that she was unstable and has personality disorders, she could have seen things that way. Not that I'm making excuses for her, but the law requires what it requires. 

Thanks for explaining. I believe that with Johnny Depp essentially losing key roles because of all the controversy, big newspaper outlets should be held more accountable than what the law currently provides for, since it's bottom-line an injustice towards Johnny. Either that or companies behaving based on statements rather than on judgements (like Disney in this case) should also be held accountable. The mental pressure this causes on a person when companies run on controversy and rumors can be very damaging to a person, both Disney and The Wall Street Journal should be examined for what happened here. It's also a bit of a plague in the industry (Chris Pratt, Scarlett Johansson), many other actors suffered similar treatment in Hollywood and it's unhealthy and damaging.

There is no law we can make that is going to be perfectly fair in every case. Holding newspapers and other platforms responsible for everything anyone says would prevent them from ever allowing any legitimate victim of abuse from ever speaking. I think holding the person who created the lie responsible is probably the best we're going to do.

At any rate even though Johnny Depp was wronged (based on what I know, I haven't been following super close), I don't really see how the fault lies with with the Washington Post. If the claims were false it makes sense to hold Heard responsible, and I think you could argue against Disney and other companies for taking actions based on only allegations (although that also has problems). As for the Washington Post, I don't see why there should be liability.

Setting aside the first amendment, if we were going to make a claim about this it would be, to simplify, negligence. Essentially a negligence claim is entity X had a duty that they failed and someone was hurt as a direct result. So, what would be the duty here? If you'd say there duty is to only to report what other people are saying when they know it to be 100% factually, I don't think that's a reasonable duty to impose. And even if you want to impose that duty, it's also hard to say that the damage was a direct result of the op ed since other entities with freedom of choice, i.e. Disney, WB, etc., could have responded differently.