WRITING ABOUT REAL PEOPLE

When a statement damages the reputation of all of the members of the group, and when those group members are known to the wider community, a court is more likely to find small group defamation, even when the class of people is fairly large. [...] For example, a person may be able to bring a second defamation lawsuit against an author or publisher for publication of the same statement that was the basis of the first lawsuit if the publisher reissued the work in a new format. [...] While a statement does not need to harm a person’s reputation in the eyes of all of the person’s associates, or even most of them, in order to be defamatory, it must harm the person’s reputation in the eyes of at least a sub- stantial number of people in the community or deter people from associating with that person. [...] 38 Writing About Real People WAS THE STATEMENT MADE WITH SOME DEGREE OF “FAULT”? Even if a statement is false and injures the subject’s reputation, the subject cannot prevail in a defamation lawsuit unless the author of the statement made it with some degree of “fault.” The Supreme Court has determined that legal liability without fault in these cases would violate the First Amendment by creating. [...] The court ruled that the second use of the photo could not be the basis for a false light claim because the boy’s identifying features were not shown, and he could only be identified by the friends and relatives who could identify the boy based on knowing he was pictured in the image’s first use in the holiday collage.25 The identifiability requirement means that subjects of false light portrayals.