Plastic Surgeon Sues Online Reviewers Who Gave Her Bad Reviews

Source: TechDirt.com
Date: July 14, 2010
By: Mike Masnick
Link: Online Story

Plastic Surgeon Sues Online Reviewers Who Gave Her Bad Reviews

from the slapp-anyone-lately? dept

Alan Bleiweiss points us to the news of a plastic surgeon, Kimberly Henry, in Marin, California, who is not at all happy that some people wrote bad reviews of her work on Yelp and DoctorScorecard. You can see the Yelp reviews and DoctorScorecard reviews to see for yourself. It’s true that some of them are really quite scathing. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to respond to such things… and Dr. Henry has chosen to sue all of her critics for ” libel and defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with prospective economic advantage” and is “seeking $1 million in general damages, $1 million in special damages, unspecified punitive damages, legal costs, injunctions against the reviewers and restraining orders.”

Similar lawsuits in the past have ended poorly — especially in California where there are pretty well-defined anti-SLAPP laws that protect commenters from abusive lawsuits designed to silence criticism. Of course, if the comments actually are defamatory, that might be a different story. If you look at the DoctorScorecard reviews, it’s interesting to see some of the reviews have responses from Dr. Henry’s office claiming that what’s said in the reviews are not true, and there’s some back and forth on some of the reviews. It’s also interesting to note that DoctorScorecard handed over the IP and email addresses of commenters when asked — with the guy who runs the site later admitting he didn’t realize that he didn’t have to do that (and that he no longer does just hand over the info). Update: To clarify, DoctorScorecard received a subpoena, not realizing that a subpoena could be fought.