Haven’t been posting for a while. Social and professional obligations are mostly why, with the addition of considerable amounts of writing (well I didn’t call this blog “The Joy of Golf”, did I?) Funny, sometimes the more engaged I am the less I feel like talking about engagement. One of those paradoxes of life, I suppose.
I wanted to talk about libel – or as it’s known now in Irish law, “defamation”, so we don’t need to keep making that tedious distinction between libel (defamation that is published) and slander (defamation that is spoken)
Defamation is defined as “A statement that tends to injure a person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society”. Of course you can (and lawyers have) haggled over the meaning of “statement”, “reputation” and “society” but suffice it to say that if you publish or broadcast a statement saying “Susan Lanigan embezzled the funds of her local church and used the proceeds to purchase a ton of pure cocaine from a dealer round the back of the Kneebreakers pub” then I am entitled to sue you, and if I did I would probably win.
(Of course the defence could maintain that (a) I have never darkened the door of my local church to embezzle anything and (b) the chances of getting pure cocaine from anywhere in Dublin are vanishingly remote, but the injury to my reputation still stands!)
That is just and right. People should not be able to destroy someone’s reputation by wilfully publishing or broadcasting lies about them, out of god knows what motives.
When we get into the area of fiction, it all gets a bit murkier. Given that a certain number of people have to recognise the character as “you” before you have decent grounds for action, there is more chance of the perpetrator getting away with it. More chance, but not infinitely so. There was an infamous case back in 1995 when Amanda Craig’s novel Vicious Circle was published. A chap called David Sexton, an ex of Craig’s, fancied he recognised himself and brought a lawsuit against her. Craig in turn accuses him and the establishment of sexism and intimidation. In the case of Hanif Kureishi’s (thinly disguised biographical) novel Intimacy, his former partner Tracy Scoffied said “One can’t call it fiction – you might as well say it’s a fish.” She did not, however, sue Kureishi.
So what to do? If you must use from real life, change names, change appearances, change sex – until only the story is left and any similarity to the actual person is unrecognisable. Unrecognisable according to three reasonable persons of standing in society anyway.
For more info, I would point you to notes on Simon McGarr’s excellent presentation at Wordcamp Ireland earlier this year, which I attended. Notes are by Jon Jacob.
Simon blogs at tuppenceworth.ie.
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