Slander on website

[sallysue17]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? PA
A family member has posted, on a myspace, slanderous content about my dead husband, myself and my son concerning drugs, use of and selling of. He is mad at us because he wanted to borrow money and we said no. I have sent this info to the website but have not had an answer (over 24hrs). How can I stop this as we could reasonably both lose our jobs over this? I have already had several of my friends call us because their children saw this already.

[sallysue17]

I just wanted to add that my son and I have been horrified over this. We have never dealt with anything like this before.

[Proserpina]

Originally Posted by sallysue17

I just wanted to add that my son and I have been horrified over this. We have never dealt with anything like this before.

Hang tight until quincy and the other experts stop by - that's a tough situation.

[quincy]

You have taken the right first step, sallysue, by contacting MySpace to have the false statements made about you, your son, and your husband removed.

If you and your son were named and defamed on the family member's MySpace page, MySpace may remove the defamatory content based on your written request to them alone, as posting defamatory content violates the terms of service of the site. MySpace is not legally obligated to remove content on their site, however, without a court order to do so.

If a court order is necessary, you will need to take evidence of the defamatory content to court.

If you have not done this already, you can request of your family member directly that he remove the defamatory content, or you can contact an attorney and have a cease and desist letter drafted and sent to your family member, advising this family member that if the material is not removed, legal action may be pursued against him.

If on the MySpace site the family member falsely accused your dead husband of using or selling drugs, he can actually legally do that. In Pennsylvania (and in most U.S. states), a dead person cannot be defamed. All sorts of horrible things can be said about your husband and none of what is said about him can be used to support a defamation suit.

What is said about a dead person can potentially defame a living person unintentionally as well, however (ie. falsely saying a dead person ran the "family" illegal drug business defames the entire family). Under these circumstances, the false implications can be reputationally injurious to the living, even though the defamatory statement was made about a person who is dead and defamation-proof.

Defamation actions are extremely costly, so you would need to have the web page reviewed by an attorney to get a clearer picture of whether any legal action against your family member would be worth pursuing. If the statements that were made about you and your son were so outrageous as to not be believeable, then no reputational injury will result and a defamation action is unlikely to be successful. If you and your son have suffered severe reputational injury as a result of the defamatory statements, however, legal action against the family member could make sense.

Good luck.