Woman Wins Libel Suit Despite Suing Wrong Website

The confusion resulted from the lawsuit leaving off a "y" suing TheDirt.com instead of the people that the plaintiff thought were guilty TheDirty.com. TheDirt.com failed to respond and had a $11 million default judgment entered against them. TheDirty.com apparently never knew of the suit at all. Now the TheDirt.com is (jokingly?) considering suing the original plaintiff for libel against them, and TheDirty.com is upset that the AP reported they lost despite having never been served. What a mess...

Two morals of this story; check the spelling on your lawsuits (especially regarding the defendant's name), and never fail to respond to a suit.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100831/18025610848.shtml

"The lawsuit itself came from a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader/high school English teacher named Sarah Jones, who was upset that the site in question apparently posted a picture of her and reported that she had an affair with a player and had contracted two venereal diseases. Assuming there's no truth to the rumors, it sounded like a straightforward libel case -- though from all the reporting, it's not clear if the site owners themselves wrote the content, or if it was written by a user -- in which case the site might have Section 230 protections (potentially depending on how involved they were in encouraging such content).

So why is the case suddenly interesting? Well, perhaps because it now appears that Ms. Jones' lawyers sued the wrong company. Oops. The lawsuit was filed against Los Angeles-based Dirty World Entertainment Recordings, which runs the website TheDirt.com. Problem is that the site that contained the content in question was TheDirty.com, and that's run by a Scottsdale-based company called Dirty World LLC who had no indication that there was a lawsuit going on at all. Oops indeed. At least no one sued us.

Amusingly, the folks at TheDirt.com are amusingly asking if they should sue for libel right back, considering all the press coverage claiming (falsely) that they had libeled Ms. Jones. Oh, and as for TheDirty.com, it's also asking the AP for an apology for falsely reporting that it had lost the lawsuit when it hadn't even been served. Quite a dirty mess."