To IAAL.
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I thought i had answered your questions, i was certainly not trying to 'gloss over' them.
My understanding of libel may be faulty. I thought it's essence inhered in the untruth of the statement and it's capacity to damage.
So to your first question "what was the libellous statement?"
These 4 statements are factually untrue:-
#1; "For instance, one MI6 operative, ‘Xxxx Xxxxxxx,’ has tried to get on here under 30 fake IDs,....."
#2; "‘Xxxx’ initiated a telephone threat campaign late last year in England which has extended to America lately."
#3; "Before, he contented himself with a voluminous email slander campaign."
#4; "He’s the MI6 agent in charge of destroying this network,....."
Their capacity to damage will emerge, i hope, later on.
Your second question i thought i had given the sort of answer you wanted, but apparently not. I'll try again. You asked "how much money do you have?"
Right now i have £10 in my back pocket and 64pence in change. I have a current account which is £300 overdrawn against a limit of £450, so £150 of the banks money to go.
Credit cards are not maxed out and something approaching £1500 could be available, but crippling to do so.
Disposable income after housing costs (rent and council tax) is around £105 a week.
No savings. I don't know what else i can tell you.
To Legal Beagle and jmeloow.
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To answer your questions i have to give a little more background to this business.
The forum which carried the post i am complaining about is one of maybe 6 forums all concerned with a particular sort of activism. It's tricky to talk about and remain discrete. The 'network' as one might call it would probably be regarded as part of the lunatic fringe by most ordinary people. It seems relevant to emphasise that none of this activity is in any way illegal or life threatening. I'm sorry to be so cryptic, but it seems appropriate at present.
The point of relevance here is that within the community of people who are part of or connected to this network, reputation is very significant. To be called an 'agent' is tantamaount to being named a paedophile or adulterer at your local church. The concerns of this network impact on areas that have been a passionate life interest of mine for over 30 years. It is in this sort of context that this ongoing libel is and has been damaging.
I think it fair to say that inspite of the general hugeness of the internet at large, when it comes to pools of shared interest one can find it to be quite a small world. I am a member on various forums and often find it incumbent upon me--in the sense that honesty dictates--to tell moderators of this 'history' before they learn it from elsewhere. Either this or change my name.
The forum in question, in it's present state and on it's present servers is only a couple of months old. It can be read (all except some private elements--which i have not seen) by any member of the public. I have never tried to register as a member and so have only read what is publically accessible, including the libellous post. Lets call it forum D.
Before forum D started (in March, i think) the same people had run another forum of the same name but on a different ISP's servers since September 2003. I shall call *that* forum C. Since 'D' started, it is not active and remains only as an archive.
In it's turn forum C started life as a breakaway from another large and still running forum i shall call B. Forum B in turn started out in early summer of 2002 as a breakaway from the original and still going strong forum A.
I initially became involved in this circus at all when i joined forum B (and A) in november 2002. Everything was fine, i was not a troublesome poster and never had to be 'moderated' until suddenly in March 2003 i found i was banned from forum B and all my posts expunged. I emailed the owner and others to find out why, but nobody ever replied. It was some time before i could 'join enough dots' to make sense of what had happened. I think i had been the subject of a character assassinating private email campaign which started inside the first 2 weeks of my joining the thing, the core of which was the accusation that i was this MI6 agent, with a license to kill and alsorts of paranoid nonsense. After March '03 this was aired in many public posts in such a way that all would know who was accused though my real name scarcely mentioned.
I had no means of reply beyond protests of innocence via email to the 6 people i figured were making the accusations. They replied to none of it. Finally realising that it was all futile i gave up writing to them around August last year. By definition my protests of innocence are lies. Think witch trials and you have something like the model.
For completeness i should say that i did join forum C in the name i was known by, made one post which was deleted and account closed in about half an hour. A little later i joined it again with another user name with a similarly short life. That was the full extent of it. Forum D, which carries the libel i have aired here, i have never attempted to join.
pip
