Doctor Plans To Appeal Ruling That Said Complaining About His Bedside Manner Was Not Defamation

from the this-isn't-helping-your-cause dept

We recently wrote about a court ruling against a doctor who tried to sue someone who wrote some bad reviews about the doctor's bedside manner online. Thankfully, the court ruled that those reviews were not defamatory. The court noted that the guy posting the material was clearly not happy with Dr. David McKee, but that:

"In modern society, there needs to be some give and take, some ability for parties to air their differences.... Today, those disagreements may take place on various Internet sources. Because the medium has changed, however, does not make statements of this sort any more or less defamatory."

Now, a smart doctor might take that lesson and move forward, and perhaps look into ways to respond reasonably to complaints. Or, there's Dr. David McKee, who has announced that he has "no choice" but to appeal the ruling. That's actually wrong. He has plenty of choices. For example, he could not appeal the ruling.

Amusingly, part of the reason that Dr. McKee is apparently filing the appeal is because he claims that the same guy started writing a bunch more critical messages about him online after the ruling came out. However, the guy, Dennis Laurion, insists that he hasn't posted anything since the lawsuit began, and suggests that perhaps all of those anti-McKee posts came about because of the negative publicity associated with the lawsuit. Specifically, he notes that "there was an influx of Internet chatter about McKee after a link to a story about McKee appeared on the high-traffic website reddit.com." So what next? Will Dr. McKee try to sue a bunch of Reddit posters too? I'm sure that will go over well...

Filed Under: comments, defamation, doctor, reddit