Chip Babcock Communiqué

Chip Babcock Communiqué Oh What a Tangled Web

Truth is the foundation of our justice system and certainly of defamation law, where truth or falsity is a central issue. But it is much more elusive on the internet.

I recently defended a defamation case where the plaintiff was a former teacher who had engaged in a sex chat with a woman who sent the chat to a website dedicated to unmasking cheating spouses. In the chat, the teacher described in some detail his sexual relations with one of his high school students. A television station was tipped to the website and reported the chat, along with a picture of the teacher (who had forwarded it to his sex chat partner).

That night the teacher was recognized by a viewer, and a complaint was filed with the school board, which promptly gave the teacher the option of resigning or being fired. The teacher chose the former and sued the television station for defamation and tortious interference with contract.

He did not deny the sex chat but said that his discussion about having sex with a student was "fantasy" designed to impress his sex chat partner. At his deposition he testified that "nobody believes what is on the internet." So his lawsuit boiled down to a claim that the television station was lying about him by publishing his lies (fantasy) and thereby causing him to lose his teaching position. Not surprisingly, the court granted summary judgment in favor of the television station.

But what about the proposition that nobody believes anything on the internet? A new book by MIT professor Sherry Turkle (Alone Together) addresses this very point. "In the 1990s," she writes, "the computer had become a portal that enabled people to lead parallel lives in virtual worlds (and eroded) boundaries between the real and virtual as (people) moved in and out of their lives on the screen."

Dr. Turkle goes on to describe how she met "many people, who found online life more satisfying than what some derisively called 'RL,' that is, real life." She interviewed a young man named Brad and wrote that "Brad worries about getting confused between what he composes for his online life and who he really is. It burdens him that things he says online affect how people treat him in the real. Brad struggles to be more himself (online) but this is hard."

This may explain why, in a survey I did with Jason Bloom of Bloom Strategic Consulting of juror-qualified persons in Dallas County, 52 percent of those under 30 years of age said that blogs do not have to contain the truth, and why of the 557 people questioned, 42.9 percent said that people should be allowed to say whatever they want in a blog. If truth on the internet is meaningless, then how can one ever ascertain the "Truth" in a trial or legal proceeding involving internet speech, and how can a jury ever find falsity?

The answer, my friend, is not blowin' in the wind. It is tangled up in a complicated web that is changing our lives and our perceptions about what is — the truth.

— Chip Babcock is a partner at Jackson Walker. He can be reached at cbabcock@jw.com.