$60,000 Damages for Blogging the Truth About Someone, Intending to Get the Person Fired
I blogged about the Johnny Northside case (Moore v. Hoff) when the verdict came down, but there’s now a moderately detailed trial court opinion refusing to set the verdict aside. Here’s an excerpt from a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article about this latest development:
The jury ruled last March that [John] Hoff’s scathing blog post amounted to actively interfering with [Jerry] Moore’s job at the U, even though Hoff’s statements were true when he linked Moore to high-profile mortgage fraud.
The jury awarded Moore $35,000 for lost wages and $25,000 for emotional distress….
Moore, former executive director of the Jordan Area Community Council, was hired in early 2009 at the U’s Urban Research and Outreach/Engagement Center to study mortgage foreclosures.
When Hoff found out about the hire, he wrote a post accusing Moore of being involved in a “high-profile fraudulent mortgage” that was one of several resulting in a 16-year prison sentence for former real estate agent Larry Maxwell. Moore was not charged in that case.
Hoff took partial credit for Moore’s firing in a later blog post, to which Moore responded with his suit.
As I wrote in March, people are constitutionally entitled to speak the truth about others, even with the goal of trying to get them fired. (The tort actually requires either knowledge that such a result is practically certain or a purpose of producing such a result, but I take it that here the allegation is that Hoff wanted Moore to get fired.) The First Amendment constrains the interference with business relations tort, just as it constrains the infliction of emotional distress and other torts.
I doubt this judgment will stand up as higher courts review it. But imagine if it did. You could sue someone and win for saying something truthful or quasi-truthful about you that causes you to lose your job.
Who would be sweating that precedent?
I’ll give you a hint: Sounds like “Southern Poverty Law Center.”
