I&#39;m being hacked, stalked and gossiped about. Do I have a chance at suing for slander, character assasination? I am a member of a laid back, everyone's equal, religious organization. Several years ago, a new parson was hired. He is a power seeker, a liar, and a narcissist. He aligned himself with a low but narcissistic staff person. The two of them have taken over the organization, running it like a business, not a religion. The female staff person harassed me for several years until I asked for mediation. During that meeting, she replied to every comment with "I don't remember". After that meeting, she had the parson continue to make the allegations for her. Little by little, the staff person began telling other congregants horrible gossip about me. Each person whom I have spoken to so far, has told me the identical story. They believe her gossip at my expense. Why, I cannot imagine. The staff person, has said that I am mentally ill. That during the last year and a half, I have done all sorts of wrong-doings, that I am a liar, that I have claimed that my computer has been hacked (it has, and the person has begun stalking me)but that I have not been hacked, that I have behaved badly. The truth is that I left the church exactly a year and a half ago out of fear of more retaliation from her. I have a serious illness which gets worse with stress. I have literally been in my home this entire time. And, coincidentally, I got hacked as soon as I left the organization. Various congregants have told me basically the same thing. Some have added that "I am not the center of the universe", "Nobody cares about you if you are sick or not", "We don't believe you are sick", "You can't be trusted". Lastly, like a good mystery movie, guess who the hacker is? The pastor. I have the proof. I have given it go the authorities. They don't seem to be in any rush. It sounds fantastically unbelievable. These two people have set themselves up to rule this organization by lying, skimming off the top of the financial donations and more. People in the congregation experience cognitive dissonance. They can't imagine that what I say is true It is a holy nightmare for me.I have gone to every authority for help, including Domestic Violence Shelters. Now, with this horrific gossip, I am losing whatever support I have. There are 400 people in this organization. Do I have a shot at a court case or is that not worth my time? These people have maliciously made my life a living hell. I am still being hacked, every day.
Defamation that is actionable in court in the United States consists of a false statement about a presently existing fact that damages your reputation and is not a matter of opinion. While not strictly required in a case involving private parties that is not a matter of public concern, most defamation cases require proof that the false statement was made knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth (which basically means with no factual basis and no ability to know if it is true or false). Hyperbole is excluded. Statements made to you personally cannot be defamatory, since you know the truth. For example, claims that you were falsely called mentally ill might be considered statement of opinion or hyperbole. Similarly, if the person who said you weren't being hacked actually believed this was true (e.g. the pastor's assistant might believe this based upon what the pastor who was knowledgeable about computers might have told the assistant), then that might also not be actionable. Most states have quite short statutes of limitations for defamation. For example, in Colorado, the statute of limitations is one year from the date that you learn that a statement was made to another person. Some kinds of defamatory statements (slander per se) do not require proof that you suffered actual damage to your reputation. Other kinds of defamatory statements do require hard proof of your economic damages. Harassment does not neatly fit into one legal category. There could be claims for intentional infliction of extreme emotional distress, for breach of fiduciary duty owed by a pastor to a parishioner, for sexual harassment if factually appropriate, or for retaliation for certain kinds of lawful conduct. None of these are particularly easy to prove and again, the statute of limitations is not terribly long, typically two or three years from an incident. Both defamation and harassment claims would be subject to first amendment immunities to the extent that they involved a religious official who could be legitimately characterized as carrying out a religious function in making the statements. Given the events you describe, this is probably a weak defense, but it would certainly pose one more hurdle to a lawsuit. Another remedy for harassment and stalking, in addition to or instead of money damages in a lawsuit, might be to seek a restraining order against the people who are the source of the problem if you could really prove it with evidence that is admissible in a court of law that a judge would be likely to find to be more credible than the lies that they try to tell to defend themselves in court. Finally, many forms of hacking violate state and federal laws and one of the federal laws, at least, contains a right to bring a private lawsuit against the hacker to enforce it. The first amendment religion and free speech clauses would not generally protect any hacking activity either. But, proving that someone is guilty of hacking, even in the face of strong circumstantial evidence, is often very difficult. For example, even if you can prove that the hacking originated at an IP address belonging to the pastor, proving that the pastor was actually the person at the keyboard and not a friend of his or another family member of his, might be quite difficult to prove. Also, as in the cases of defamation and harassment, quantifying your money damages could be difficult. Stalking and hacking are also both usually criminal offenses so you could file a complaint with a law enforcement agency, although many law enforcement agencies lack the ability and competence to understand and investigate hacking cases and the inclination to deal firmly with allegations of stalking. There are practical steps that can be taken to prevent hacking from a technological angle, although I am not competent to tell you what they are, and your post doesn't provide sufficient detail to know in any case. Obviously, this isn't a legal solution. You can also be mindful in your daily life to act in a manner that mitigates your exposure to stalking although there are limits to how effective this non-legal solution can be as well. You can combat character assassination with non-legal PR and counter-gossip approaches as well as with lawsuits. Ultimately, you need to decide what to do and may need to confer with a lawyer and give that lawyer detailed factual information to evaluate your claims, and you may or may not decide that the legal system is a good solution. Proving incidents in a he said, she said situation, especially when one of the people involved is an outwardly respected pastor who has no qualms about lying and gas lighting, can be very difficult - so in the absence of proof, you may need to figure out how to develop proof before it is sensible to sue and you may not have much time to do that. You are unfortunately in a situation with no easy solution, just a variety of second best options, and you have to decide which ones to pursue. You also need to focus not on what remedies the law allows, or what wrongs have been done by the perpetrators. Instead, you need to focus on what will maximize your personal well being. Some people find that litigation can bring closure and relief, but ultimately, you can't control what the criminal justice system does and you have only partial control over what happens in a civil lawsuit. The litigation process prevents you from letting go of the matter if you later decide that is what will serve you best, can be costly, can be unjust, and can be aggravating. In terms of time, treasure and its impact on you emotionally, it can be a very expensive solution and can force you into a position where you are not in control. If the court finds that your evidence isn't solid enough, you could end up worse off, rather than better off, as a result of a civil lawsuit. And, usually, you can not get your attorneys' fees as part of your damages in a civil lawsuit for defamation or some kinds of harassment (such as intentional infliction of emotional distress) even if you prevail. Ultimately, a court in a civil action for wrongful conduct can award you money, but can't vindicate you morally or remove that person from his position in the organization. Also, if you win a money judgment, you still have to identify assets or income from which you can collect it and many of these claims would not be covered by any insurance policy. And, ultimately, a restraining order, while potentially a helpful tool in helping to get the wrong doers to back off, is just a piece of paper stating your rights and describing conduct that would be wrongful and punished if proven, not a magical shield that prevents someone from violating that restraining order just as they have violated your dignity and reasonable expectations of civil treatment and probably your legal rights already. You have to decide what your personal objectives are and how best to achieve them without getting unduly focused on the limited and imperfect options that the legal system provides.
Surely such a well meaning albeit naive driver wouldn't stand a chance in court if they said that it's because they've a section 230-like protection. Because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act explicitly protects computer service providers from such charges. A driver is not a computer service provider, and the US legislature has never voted to offer similar protection to drivers picking up hitchhikers. You say that an email can easily be classified as fraudulent, but that's not true. Spam detection has gotten pretty sophisticated, but they still get plenty of false positives. They were a lot less sophisticated back in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act was passed.
Yes The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws. Let's start here: "I bought a game". No, you didn't; you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software. If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing. Which brings us to the copyright violation. You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. But you didn't. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions. Finally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems. Putting aside the illegalities, cheats are unethical and ruin the game experience for hundreds of thousands of people who don't use cheats. You are a criminal - stop being one!
In theory, a store can ban you or anyone else for any reason except those protected by law against discrimination. As a practical matter, you potentially have various forms of recourse. The first thing to do is to write the the CEO of the chain, with a long detailed letter describing the incidents, and naming names. Most CEO's don't want to deal with this kind of bad publicity, and will at least order an investigation, and make amends, if the internal investigation is in your favor. This would apply even to the late Sam Walton, if the chain is WalMart, or whoever the current CEO is. If you are a member of a protected minority, or even have dark skin, you can sue the chain on those grounds. There will be a presumption that they barred you on grounds of race or color. Then the burden of proof will be on them to show that they didn't bar you for those causes. As a form of "entrapment," you should take a witness, basically the most influential person you can get hold of that's not a family member, to the store with you to ask them why you were barred. The mayor of your town would be ideal, more llkely it would be a boss, teacher, or clergyman, but in any event, someone who knows you well. If you can get them to accuse you of stealing in front of this third party, you have the makings of a defamation case. And even if you aren't a minority, you can sue them anyway. You can demand "discovery" of all internal documents, videos, etc. relating to your case. Your lawyer will also the right to "depose" (cross examine) all offending managers.There's a good chance that something embarrassing will turn up in the process. (Many defendants settle in connection with discovery.) You might want to hire a second (libel) lawyer to teach you how to publicize the case without running into libel laws. If all this fails, the store can probably bar you, but you want to make it prohibitively expensive for them to do so, meaning that most rational people wouldn't bar you after the above. If they do, they're not rational and you're better off not using the store.
The most important fact to bear in mind is that there's no way to predict whether a given individual will decide to file a suit against you, though we might say on what basis he might, if he so chooses. There are two basic grounds for a suit, one pertaining to trademarks and the other pertaining to use of names – misappropriation and violating the right of publicity. A word can be a trademark, but the scope of protection is somewhat narrow because the protection is in terms of use within a given business. So calling your computer company "Apple" is out, but calling you roofing service the same is okay (assuming that somebody didn't previously register "Apple Roofing"). The main consideration is the likelihood of confusion. Supposing your business were selling landline telephones and I don't think Apple computer company sells such phones, you might still be in trouble if you called your company "Apple Phone", since they certainly do sell phones. There are thousands of trademarks that include "Puff", including Cocopuffs and various pizza and cheese puffs. Since "Puff" is such a generic word, there is a higher bar to proving infringement (there are thousands of trademarks including "Puff"). "Puff Daddy" is, however, a registered trademark covering perfume, jewelry, clothing and certain online services, so there is a non-negligible chance of confusion. In the case of names (or apparent names), an additional concern is whether this is commercial exploitation without consent of a person's name (which causes harm to the subject). The underpinning of this tort is that such a use falsely implies an endorsement of the product. Again, with a fairly generic word like Puff, there isn't a clear implication that Sean Combs has endorsed a product that is called "Puff Communications", but "Puff Daddy Communications" would almost certainly cross that line. The main issues, then, are the extent to which the name is generic vs. unique, and whether it is likely that a person would interpret the product or service as being the same as another, or would constitute an endorsement.
Submit emails in their totality Your testimonial affidavit can quote or cite them as applicable. There is no protection of anyone’s privacy in court. By the way, the email where admissions were made is probably inadmissible if it was sent were in the course of bona fide negotiation to resolve the dispute. If the other party objects they will be thrown out - I wouldn’t hang my case on them.
"If it were not assize-time, I would not take such language from you." (said while grabbing the handle of sword) This is a famous conditional threat where the speaker/actor was not found to express intent to do harm; perhaps better called a negative condition. This probably confuses matters but if you are to search for more answers this could be a good place to start. One of the elements of common law assault is that the threat must be able to be carried out immediately; it must be imminent. I do not have a cite for this but I recall that this means that conditional threats are excluded from assault. So calling a politician on the phone and telling them that if they do not drop out of a race you will hurt them is not assault. So, "You cut that out now or you’ll go home in an ambulance" sounds a lot like, "stop or you will get hurt." The victim has the opportunity to avoid the danger; the threat is not imminent. But the facts here are interesting because the speaker touched the victim while speaking which might mean fear of imminent was real. But they were in a crowded room in front of cameras - could the victim really feel that threat was imminent? Plus, the "you will go home" implies a future harm. Oh, and the speaker does not say "I will hurt you," maybe she was actually trying to protect the victim from someone else's actions. Like when my teacher knew someone was waiting outside the classroom to fight me and she told me, "if you go out there you will get hurt!" I would hope that a jury would consider this hard bargaining.
It doesn't really require anything beyond your say-so that it is what you say it is; that would be enough to satisfy the requirement for authentication. From there though, as with any evidence, it's going to be up to a jury to decide how much weight to give the evidence. So the more you can show them to prove that the record is real -- and to knock down any questions the opposing party will raise -- the more likely they are to believe it. So if you just bring a printout that looks like it could easily have been forged, the jury may be thinking about that. If you can bring in a data forensics expert to say the document couldn't have been faked, that's probably going to help. Addendum: As a practical matter, I wouldn't expect this to be much of an issue. Unless you're dealing with a savvy opposing party, the authenticity of e-mails seems to be generally assumed. Courts (1) generally assume that parties aren't perpetrating frauds; and (2) are generally run by judges with little to no technical savvy, who don't realize that one could forge an e-mail, let alone all the different ways it could be done. I've personally entered countless e-mail printouts without them being questioned, even though either party could have just gone down into the e-mail thread and changed what the other side had said earlier in the conversation. To avoid the issue, though, it might be that sending the e-mail to a Gmail account would elimimate the question.