Court: Student Can Sue Cyber-Bullies for Threatening His Life

The Nuts and Bolts:  A 15-year-old launches a website hoping to promote an entertainment career after landing a role in a movie and recording an album.  His fellow students at a Los Angeles high school wrongly assume that the kid is gay, and they start flooding the site with hateful comments.  When the comments deteriorate into overt threats against the boy's life, police suggest that the parents take their son out of school.  The family relocates to an undisclosed location in Northern California.  Is there any legal recourse for the youth?  A California court ruling says yes, and now the boy is suing six students and their parents for hate crimes, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Bob Egelko reports for the San Francisco Chronicle:  A state appeals court says a 15-year-old boy whose Web site was flooded with anti-gay slurs and threats can sue a schoolmate who admitted posting a menacing message but described it as a joke.  In a 2-1 ruling Monday, the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles said the violent language of the message - threatening to "rip out your heart and feed it to you" and to "pound your head in with an ice pick" - conveyed a harmful intent that is not protected by the right of free speech.  The dissenting justice, Frances Rothschild, said no one who read all the messages posted on the Web site - in which youths tried to outdo the others in outrageous insults - would interpret any of them as a serious threat.  (But this wasn't about mere "insults."  Would Rothschild be so forgiving if an online bully wrote that he was going to stab her daughter's face with an ice pick?)  The case is one of the first in California to examine the boundaries between free expression and cyber-bullying. The court majority said a message that threatens physical harm, even if it wasn't meant to be serious, loses its First Amendment protection and can be grounds for a lawsuit.

One of the cyber-bullies named in the case said he didn't know the victim personally but was offended by the website's self-promotional tone.  Apparently this was reason enough for him to threaten the life of his classmate.  He continues to insist that his messages were "just a joke."  His lawyer plans to appeal the majority ruling to the State Supreme Court.

Back to Egelko:  The state law allows a defendant to win early dismissal of a suit that chills free speech on a subject of public interest and has little chance of success. The court majority said the law didn't apply to (the victim's) suit because the messages contained threats that were unrelated to any issues of public interest.

From the LA Times:  The 1st Amendment doesn't protect hostile Internet banter among teenagers if the messages can be taken as genuine threats of harm, a California appeals court has ruled in a case that more clearly defines when free expression crosses a line into cyber-bullying...  "The students who posted the threats sought to destroy D.C.'s life, threatened to murder him, and wanted to drive him out of Harvard-Westlake and the community in which he lived," the appeals court concluded in denying the motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by one of the defendants on the grounds that the postings amounted to constitutionally protected speech on a public issue... "It's very important that the court here is recognizing the real harm and power of anti-gay speech that has become very common in cyber-bullying and in schools," said Douglas NeJaime, a Loyola Law School professor and expert in sexual-orientation law.

Just watch. It won't be long before religious conservatives rush to the defense of these cyber-bullies.  Any court ruling that might restrict their own "God-given right" to threaten and intimidate LGBT youngsters is considered anathema to Bible thumpers - so I'm betting that Christian fundie groups will get involved in this case before the month is out.  I suspect the homo-hating lawyers at MassResistance are already licking their lips in prayerful anticipation.

Comments

[Christopher Smart]

Thank God for "fundies" if they are willing to defend the First Amendment, since in this topsy-turvy world self-styled "progressives" are ready to flush it down the toilet.