A judge Wednesday dismissed a libel lawsuit filed last year by a ChicagoChicago reviews
property firm against a tenant who complained about her “moldy apartment” on Twitter.
“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay,” Amanda Bonnen wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m.
Horizon Group Management, which leased the UptownUptown reviews
apartment to Bonnen, wasn’t pleased and filed a libel suit against her saying she “maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory Tweet.”
On Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court Judge Diane J. Larsen ordered the case dismissed with prejudice, meaning that Horizon cannot refile the same case. According to Bonnen’s attorney, the judge felt the tweet was too vague to meet the legal standards of libel.
The offending message apparently rose out of a class-action suit
filed in March after a contractor caused a roof leak that affected some
units at 4242 N. Sheridan Road, then Bonnen’s home. When it filed the
libel suit in July, Horizon said in a statement that all grievances with tenants in the class action were resolved “amicably,” except Bonnen’s.
While
responding to the class action, Horizon’s lawyers found Bonnen’s tweet
and “acted to protect our reputation just as we would for any other
related comment made in a public forum,” Horizon said at the time of
the libel suit.
Bonnen moved out of the apartment at the end of
June “of her own volition … at which time there was no mold in her
apartment,” the statement said.
The last entry in her
Twitter account was logged at 10:11 a.m. July 22, a day before
Horizon’s filed the libel suit. The account itself is no longer online.
One
of Bonnen’s lawyers said this morning the judge dismissed the case on
the grounds that the tweet itself was too vague to fit the legal
elements required to prove a libel case.
The tweet, said Leslie Ann Reis, “could be innocently construed. It could be construed as her opinion.”
“It
mentioned Horizon Realty but it never specified whether it referred to
Chicago or Illinois and knowing that Twitter is international, that
could pertain to any company that uses the name Horizon,” said Reis,
who is director of the Center for Information Technology and Privacy
Law at John Marshall Law School.
That, she said, runs afoul of
one of the elements required in proving a libel, that the plaintiff
show the defendant made a false statement specifically about the
plaintiff. Another requirement is that the statement be published –
which it was, via Twitter — but the third element asks the plaintiff
to prove actual harm from the statement, such as damage to its reputation or negative financial effects.
While the publication
channel was novel, the legal grounding was not. “This was not a case
about Twitter. This was a case about defamation. … The fact of the
matter is that you have to meet all those elements” to prove libel, Reis said.
A
lawyer for Horizon did not immediately return a call for comment. A woman who answered the phone at Horizon’s Sheridan Road corporate office hung up without commenting.
By
law, the plaintiff has 30 days to appeal the judge’s ruling.
Reis
said the center took on Bonnen’s case pro bono and was assisted by a
group of law students and attorneys Richard Balough and Jeff Sobek.
The suit wasn’t the first Twitter-related libel action. Last year, in March, a Texas-based fashion designer sued Courtney Love, the wife of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, claiming Love called her a “nasty lying hosebag thief” and tweeted that she was a drug addict, prostitute and thief. That case is still ongoing, according to the Harvard University’s Citizen Media Law Project.
In another case, the creators of the “Cookie Diet” sued reality-TV star Kim Kardashian for defamation after they posted on their Web site that she used their technique, and she allegedly tweeted back that she “would never do this unhealthy diet.”
– Andrew L. Wang
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