Streisand Effect Still Works: Vancouver Roofing Company Hit With Negative Reviews After Suing Over A Negative Review

from the how-do-you-not-expect-this? dept

Last week, KGW8 had an incredible story about how a couple in Vancouver, Washington were sued after leaving a 1-star review for Executive Roof Services (ERS). The defendants in the lawsuit, Autumn Knepper and Adam Marsh, were (reasonably!) annoyed about the treatment they received from the firm after their landlord had asked ERS to check out the roof to the house, after the couple found it leaking. The experience they had with ERS was not great:

Knepper said she called the office and talked with the receptionist, who she said was rude from the time she answered the phone.

“She refused to give me any information. She said I would have to get it from the landlord. I asked to speak with the manager and she laughed at me. She told me I was verbally abusing her and that she was the office manager. She hung up on me,” said Knepper.

Marsh said he called ERS and had a similar bad experience with the woman who answered the phone.

“She was just super rude, told me that she was office manager and there was no one else I could talk to and hung up on me,” said Marsh.

So they each wrote a 1-star review on Google explaining what happened. Apparently, the owner of ERS, Michael Mecham, didn't take kindly to all of this. Again, according to KGW8:

“He told me that he knew where I lived. He said he had forensics guy and that he would gladly spend a hundred thousand dollars suing me,” said Knepper.

Knepper said the owner texted her and said the review needed to be taken down before “more damages are done.”

Knepper said she called the police, which led to an officer asking Mecham to no longer contact the couple.

“We thought that was the end of it,” said Knepper.

But, instead, they were sued for defamation (the lawsuit was filed in Clark County, and it appears that the documents for the lawsuit are not readily available online or we'd include them here). The lawyer for ERS, David Bowser... um... doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. He first told a reporter from KGW that it wasn't about the review... and then seemed to immediately admit it was about the review:

Bowser said the couple did not hire ERS, the landlord did. Because of that he said they weren’t entitled to the information they requested -- a project report and timeline -- because they were not customers or clients of ERS. This is part of our exchange when we asked Bowser about the suit:

Cristin Severance, KGW: "Whether they're paying customers or not, shouldn't they be entitled to write about their experience? They said the receptionist was rude."

David Bowser, attorney: "It depends why they did that. If they were doing it merely to express their opinion, that's what other customers have done in the past. I don't have an issue with that. ERS doesn't have an issue with that. But when you cross the line and you use this forum to cause intentional harm to a family-owned business and hurt them and their employees and their business, you've crossed the line."

Severance: "How did they intentionally harm ERS by writing about a rude receptionist?"

Bowser: "They intentionally harmed ERS by posting one-star reviews for the purpose of getting a report they weren't entitled to."

That's... not how any of this works. At all. They have every right to write a review about their experience. Bowser seems particularly clueless about SLAPP suits. Washington just passed a new anti-SLAPP law, though technically it didn't go into effect until this weekend. But Bowser should maybe learn what that means:

Bowser argues this is not a SLAPP filing.

Bowser: “That is not what a SLAPP lawsuit is, a SLAPP is a motion. This is a lawsuit. The lawsuit asserts claims for defamation and for intentional interference with business expectancies,” said Bowser.

Wut? The "L" in SLAPP stands for lawsuit, guy. And this is a classic SLAPP. It's a lawsuit over obviously protected speech, and was clearly filed to try to silence Knepper and Marsh. When the reporter asked Bowser how is this not trying to silence someone, Bowser responded that this was "not something that they legitimately had a basis to give an opinion on." And, again, this is not how anything works. You get to give your opinion on anything you want. I get to give my opinion on this lawsuit -- which is one of the SLAPPiest SLAPP suits I've seen in a long time. You don't get to unilaterally declare that they can't give their opinion.

But, of course, even more incredible is that, here, the lawyer for ERS has now admitted that it was their opinion. And, I mean, you don't need to be even a terrible lawyer to know that opinions are not defamatory.

Either way, it's not difficult to see what happened next. KGW8 is reporting that the owner of ERS says he had to take down his website after receiving a ton of 1-star reviews. Not that anyone should condone leaving made up 1-star reviews, but how the hell did neither he nor his foolish lawyer realize how this was going to end up?

Filed Under: anti-slapp, david bowser, defamation, free speech, opinions, reviews, slapp, vancouver, washington
Companies: executive roof services

Senator Klobuchar Proposes An Unconstitutional Law That Would Kill Legions Of People If Trump Were Still President

from the self-evident-unconstitutionality dept

This bill is so bad it was worth a second post.

There is a reason that the Constitution contains the provision, "Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech." And this new bill proposed by Senator Klobuchar (who really should know better) gets at the heart of it. Because what her bill would do is make a law that, at its core, pointedly interferes with freedom of speech by allowing the government to penalize certain expression. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that its choices for which speech to favor will be sound and healthy ones for society. In fact, given the performance of the previous presidential administration, there's plenty of reason to believe the result would be the exact opposite.

The mechanics of this interference are fairly straight forward. Her bill, "The Health Misinformation Act of 2021," would condition Section 230's platform protection to apply only to platforms that moderate user content as the government has decreed they should moderate it. The constitutional problems with this scheme should thus be readily apparent: First, it directly violates platforms' First Amendment rights to moderate user content as they see fit by effectively forcing them to moderate content as the government has decided they should, lest they risk the loss of a critical statutory protection they otherwise would have had. Secondly, the bill inherently allows the government to put its thumb on the scale of deciding which points of view are the allowed ones and which are the ones subject to legal penalty, which obviates freedom of speech since some ideas are obviously no longer effectively free to be expressed if they can attract a censorial government-induced penalty.

The Klobuchar bill would like to pretend that the means somehow justify the ends. The government certainly has a legitimate interest in keeping the population alive and healthy, so it's not an inherently corrupt goal she's trying to further with this bill. She just wants to suppress medical misinformation that has been prolonging the pandemic.

But there's nothing about the bill that confines it to such benevolent purpose. There can't be, because that's not how government power works, which is why we have the First Amendment because we always need to be able to speak out against the government when it gets things wrong.

And we know it gets things wrong. It has gotten things wrong even just with respect to this particular health crisis that the bill is supposedly limited to. At best it made innocent mistakes, like when it discouraged masks early on in the pandemic. But then there were people in the highest offices of government touting hydroxychloroquine snake oil and discouraging social distancing. There are still people in government discouraging vaccines. How can we possibly have a law where the government gets to decide what speech is favored or not when the government itself has, even within the very same health crisis that this bill is supposedly limited to, been so conspicuously unable to reliably make those choices competently? This crisis has already outlasted one administration, and while this one might like to keep people alive with credible, scientific information, the last one did not, and who knows what might be in store with the next one. But this bill would empower a Trump Administration as much as a Biden Administration to take away the right and ability of the public to speak out against its mistakes, no matter how deadly they may be. Because a government that can force platforms to only allow, for example, pro-vaccine messages on its systems can just as easily disallow them as well. And if it does, people will die.

Furthermore, if a bill like this could be allowed for this crisis, it could be allowed for any. The government can always articulate some reason for why free expression needs to be curtailed. And throughout history it has regularly tried. A law like this, if it could get on the books, would signal it to keep trying on every policy issue that can possibly bear on our lives and the security and stability of our country – which is effectively all of them. Because today it's health misinformation the government is unhappy about. Tomorrow it could be elections. Policing. Terrorism. The draft. Even potentially something as banal as tax policy. There's always a reason the government can cite for why society should not be exposed to ideas out-of-step with what it has decided are the better ones.

But it's the people's job to decide, not the government's. Per the constitution, it's not allowed to be the government's job. The Founders got the government out of the business of choosing which views could be permitted which could be punished with its "make no law" admonishment because there is no way for the government to pick the winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas and not risk serious damage to discourse, and with it the democracy that depends on it.

And everyone in government needs to remember that.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, amy klobuchar, ben ray lujan, content moderation, free speech, health misinformation, misinformation, section 230