4 ms·

Then he is free to sue the accusers for libel.

p4wnc6 10y ago
It doesn't apply in this case, but what should someone do if they lack the financial resources to sue for libel after someone has ruined their life by creating a popular opinion that they are irredeemably guilty? One thing I've never understood is why people believe legal recourse should be considered recourse at all. It's only recourse if you happen to have the money to pay for it. In my case, I have a family member who has been dealing with a very expensive civil parenting time and custody issue, involving some severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges against the other party. The state I'm in has routinely ignored those pending charges, even ignored impassioned testimony and warnings from mental health professionals whose medical records were required for the case, all saying that the other party is a serious danger to children and, at minimum, must be strictly supervised. The state has tried time and again to quickly wrap up some cookie-cutter 6-month supervision program and get it back to full, unsupervised parenting time. Literally the only reason why we've been able to protect my family member is that we've spent an absolute fortune (an amount of money that has me personally teetering on financial ruin at this point) to have a very expensive lawyer dive deeply into every single thing we can argue to prolong the supervision. And this is all happening while there is a separate criminal case pending against this other party! You'd think the civil parenting time case's judge might take notice of that and perhaps think it prudent to see if this person will be convicted, as many mental health professionals' testimonies seem to confirm. But no, instead they just look up some parenting time guidelines in a three-ring binder, bang the gavel, and try to get you out the door as fast as possible -- truly no concern whatsoever for the well-being of the child or the grave danger of the circumstance. In the case I'm describing, we're talking about something that is practically black and white, obviously based on dangerous criminal charges with a huge mountain of evidence against them. And the justice system still requires you to spend huge amounts of your own money just to get even the barest minimum of justice, in this case protecting a child. I'd also like to add that the magic suggestion of having the judge award legal fees is also unrealistic, and one reason is that you often cannot stay solvent long enough for the magic future legal fee award to come back to you and fix things. In the current circumstance I'm in, we've had our time wasted by the opposing counsel, we've had to repeatedly file motions to get the court to force the other party to comply with things like interrogatories, yet it is the court's job to ensure compliance, not ours, but we paid for it anyway. The judge has completely dismissed all requests for court fees. In fact, one of the issues of this case is that the other party is somewhere around $4000 in arrears in child support payments, and the judge hasn't even ordered the other party to pay that back or anything. The other party's driver's license was suspended for a time (but the person drove around town, we even saw them, regardless), but no other penalty. And they successfully applied for a hardship license that removed the court order against them -- still without ever paying the back-owed child support. My mother works as a courtroom clerk and in her experience, this is how it goes 99% of the time. Lawyers just take money from you for an indeterminate amount of time while the court sits on its ass, regardless of how lopsidedly obvious the case is, and regardless of how much obvious danger there is. For people less fortunate than us, who couldn't have afforded the legal fees this long, their child would have simply been given over into regular, unsupervised parenting time with an obvious, alarmingly dangerous person, and no one in the legal system would have given two shits about it. If you have a spare $100k lying around, you might be able to protect your kid for a time. Otherwise, no one cares and your kid can just stay with the dangerous person. End of story. I can only imagine that if you want to sue for slander or libel or something, even if it's absolutely black and white that you were falsely depicted and had your reputation ruined, it's going to cost you personally an unbelievable amount of money. It's not really justice. It's pay-per-justice, or something.
- Tomte 10y ago
  That's America. Elsewhere the state will pay for an attorney if you can show in a pretrial proceeding that your claims are not obviously without merit and that you are indigent. Not "reimburse later and hope you're solvent long enough", but actually "paying the attorney". So maybe you should reexamine your premise before dismissing the idea.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    In Brazil, for instance, you can hire a lawyer and, if you prove you are right, the other part will pay for it (until a reasonable limit).
- jessaustin 10y ago
  This account would be more believable if "severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges" weren't such a common trope of USA divorce proceedings. You're complaining about the cost of lawsuits? By prolonging the case as you describe above, you are part of the problem. The reason no one else "gives two shits" about a father spending time with his children whom he loves and supports even though his ex thinks he's a cretin is because that's how it's supposed to be. If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. There are lots of kids who've never even met their fathers. Lots of them would be happy with the cretin.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    This is psychotic. For one, I intentionally did not use gender pronouns in my comment to avoid seeming like I was blaming someone in this sort of trope. Yet you inferred them anyway. Secondly, the child in question was unplanned, in a relationship that was never planned for marriage (and the two indeed never were married). The mother in question was extremely young herself, and almost 20 years younger than the father. Thirdly, there's a shitload of actual evidence of harm which was obtained from the father's personal computer and forms the basis of 8 counts of a class D felony in this state. But you know, you don't seem to care about evidence. You also clearly have zero understanding about how civil parenting and custody cases work if you think that a court's willingness to laissez-faire just let people have unsupervised time is somehow evidence that the person "isn't so bad." In my mom's experience, she's even seen a father who was convicted of raping his own daughter be awarded parenting time visits with that same daughter after his jail term had ended, despite the daughter's own testimony that she was afraid of him and did not want to ever see him. > If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. You probably don't know someone has >1000 child porn images on his computer when you first meet him. Especially since such people are well-known to be manipulative, particularly of young women. Wow. You are a piece of work. BTW, this is all publicly searchable. I want to emphasize that, until the conclusion of the criminal case, these are merely charges and he may not be found guilty. But from the position I am in, knowing what evidence there is and the feelings of professionals that he is dangerous, it is obvious that I feel a need to protect my nephew as much as possible. Feel free to go to the Indiana MyCase website and search both the criminal and civil cases. < https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search >. I don't want to give the other party's name here, since it will get indexed by Google, but you can feel free to email me at < spearsem@gmail.com >, and I'll tell you the name in personal correspondence and then you can go and look at the extensive case log yourself. I'm trying desperately to protect my nephew Ian from what I believe to be an actually dangerous person. Not trying to aid in vindictively settling an angry divorce case by appealing to inflammatory stereotypes. I personally don't care at all if anyone other than the court believes he's dangerous or guilty, nor even if he avoids jail time or never pays back owed child support or anything. I 100% only care to keep my nephew safe from him. Your lazy and clumsy I-wish-I-was-actually-smart-enough-to-make-SJW-contrarian-arguments-like-Scott-Alexander-does-but-I'm-not-and-don't-have-the-self-awareness-required-to-understand-why-my-bastardizations-of-those-contrarian-arguments-are-harmful thinking is really fucking tiresome. I know it's gonna fall on deaf ears, but you really, really should be ashamed of yourself. The attitude you depict is morally reprehensible. It's not because you fail to bombard caricatures of evil dead beat dads with morally vindictive insults. I don't want those caricatures anymore than anyone else. It's because you're a contrarian fanboy regurgitating thoughtless bullshit in an arena that actually causes people fucking harm. There really are abusive or dangerous fathers out there, and truly the only thing your faux righteous babble does is to perpetuate a culture of blaming their victims and giving them endless second chances with which they just harm and harm and harm some more.

It doesn't apply in this case, but what should someone do if they lack the financial resources to sue for libel after someone has ruined their life by creating a popular opinion that they are irredeemably guilty? One thing I've never understood is why people believe legal recourse should be considered recourse at all. It's only recourse if you happen to have the money to pay for it. In my case, I have a family member who has been dealing with a very expensive civil parenting time and custody issue, involving some severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges against the other party. The state I'm in has routinely ignored those pending charges, even ignored impassioned testimony and warnings from mental health professionals whose medical records were required for the case, all saying that the other party is a serious danger to children and, at minimum, must be strictly supervised. The state has tried time and again to quickly wrap up some cookie-cutter 6-month supervision program and get it back to full, unsupervised parenting time. Literally the only reason why we've been able to protect my family member is that we've spent an absolute fortune (an amount of money that has me personally teetering on financial ruin at this point) to have a very expensive lawyer dive deeply into every single thing we can argue to prolong the supervision. And this is all happening while there is a separate criminal case pending against this other party! You'd think the civil parenting time case's judge might take notice of that and perhaps think it prudent to see if this person will be convicted, as many mental health professionals' testimonies seem to confirm. But no, instead they just look up some parenting time guidelines in a three-ring binder, bang the gavel, and try to get you out the door as fast as possible -- truly no concern whatsoever for the well-being of the child or the grave danger of the circumstance. In the case I'm describing, we're talking about something that is practically black and white, obviously based on dangerous criminal charges with a huge mountain of evidence against them. And the justice system still requires you to spend huge amounts of your own money just to get even the barest minimum of justice, in this case protecting a child. I'd also like to add that the magic suggestion of having the judge award legal fees is also unrealistic, and one reason is that you often cannot stay solvent long enough for the magic future legal fee award to come back to you and fix things. In the current circumstance I'm in, we've had our time wasted by the opposing counsel, we've had to repeatedly file motions to get the court to force the other party to comply with things like interrogatories, yet it is the court's job to ensure compliance, not ours, but we paid for it anyway. The judge has completely dismissed all requests for court fees. In fact, one of the issues of this case is that the other party is somewhere around $4000 in arrears in child support payments, and the judge hasn't even ordered the other party to pay that back or anything. The other party's driver's license was suspended for a time (but the person drove around town, we even saw them, regardless), but no other penalty. And they successfully applied for a hardship license that removed the court order against them -- still without ever paying the back-owed child support. My mother works as a courtroom clerk and in her experience, this is how it goes 99% of the time. Lawyers just take money from you for an indeterminate amount of time while the court sits on its ass, regardless of how lopsidedly obvious the case is, and regardless of how much obvious danger there is. For people less fortunate than us, who couldn't have afforded the legal fees this long, their child would have simply been given over into regular, unsupervised parenting time with an obvious, alarmingly dangerous person, and no one in the legal system would have given two shits about it. If you have a spare $100k lying around, you might be able to protect your kid for a time. Otherwise, no one cares and your kid can just stay with the dangerous person. End of story. I can only imagine that if you want to sue for slander or libel or something, even if it's absolutely black and white that you were falsely depicted and had your reputation ruined, it's going to cost you personally an unbelievable amount of money. It's not really justice. It's pay-per-justice, or something.

Tomte 10y ago
That's America. Elsewhere the state will pay for an attorney if you can show in a pretrial proceeding that your claims are not obviously without merit and that you are indigent. Not "reimburse later and hope you're solvent long enough", but actually "paying the attorney". So maybe you should reexamine your premise before dismissing the idea.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  In Brazil, for instance, you can hire a lawyer and, if you prove you are right, the other part will pay for it (until a reasonable limit).
jessaustin 10y ago
This account would be more believable if "severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges" weren't such a common trope of USA divorce proceedings. You're complaining about the cost of lawsuits? By prolonging the case as you describe above, you are part of the problem. The reason no one else "gives two shits" about a father spending time with his children whom he loves and supports even though his ex thinks he's a cretin is because that's how it's supposed to be. If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. There are lots of kids who've never even met their fathers. Lots of them would be happy with the cretin.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  This is psychotic. For one, I intentionally did not use gender pronouns in my comment to avoid seeming like I was blaming someone in this sort of trope. Yet you inferred them anyway. Secondly, the child in question was unplanned, in a relationship that was never planned for marriage (and the two indeed never were married). The mother in question was extremely young herself, and almost 20 years younger than the father. Thirdly, there's a shitload of actual evidence of harm which was obtained from the father's personal computer and forms the basis of 8 counts of a class D felony in this state. But you know, you don't seem to care about evidence. You also clearly have zero understanding about how civil parenting and custody cases work if you think that a court's willingness to laissez-faire just let people have unsupervised time is somehow evidence that the person "isn't so bad." In my mom's experience, she's even seen a father who was convicted of raping his own daughter be awarded parenting time visits with that same daughter after his jail term had ended, despite the daughter's own testimony that she was afraid of him and did not want to ever see him. > If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. You probably don't know someone has >1000 child porn images on his computer when you first meet him. Especially since such people are well-known to be manipulative, particularly of young women. Wow. You are a piece of work. BTW, this is all publicly searchable. I want to emphasize that, until the conclusion of the criminal case, these are merely charges and he may not be found guilty. But from the position I am in, knowing what evidence there is and the feelings of professionals that he is dangerous, it is obvious that I feel a need to protect my nephew as much as possible. Feel free to go to the Indiana MyCase website and search both the criminal and civil cases. < https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search >. I don't want to give the other party's name here, since it will get indexed by Google, but you can feel free to email me at < spearsem@gmail.com >, and I'll tell you the name in personal correspondence and then you can go and look at the extensive case log yourself. I'm trying desperately to protect my nephew Ian from what I believe to be an actually dangerous person. Not trying to aid in vindictively settling an angry divorce case by appealing to inflammatory stereotypes. I personally don't care at all if anyone other than the court believes he's dangerous or guilty, nor even if he avoids jail time or never pays back owed child support or anything. I 100% only care to keep my nephew safe from him. Your lazy and clumsy I-wish-I-was-actually-smart-enough-to-make-SJW-contrarian-arguments-like-Scott-Alexander-does-but-I'm-not-and-don't-have-the-self-awareness-required-to-understand-why-my-bastardizations-of-those-contrarian-arguments-are-harmful thinking is really fucking tiresome. I know it's gonna fall on deaf ears, but you really, really should be ashamed of yourself. The attitude you depict is morally reprehensible. It's not because you fail to bombard caricatures of evil dead beat dads with morally vindictive insults. I don't want those caricatures anymore than anyone else. It's because you're a contrarian fanboy regurgitating thoughtless bullshit in an arena that actually causes people fucking harm. There really are abusive or dangerous fathers out there, and truly the only thing your faux righteous babble does is to perpetuate a culture of blaming their victims and giving them endless second chances with which they just harm and harm and harm some more.