Articles Tagged with Defamation; Stormy Daniels loses Defamation Suit; Chicago Business Lawyer

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If you’ve watched any of the Democratic presidential debates, you might have heard candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang – you know, the guy with the $1,000 per month guaranteed income plan – talk about something called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”   This is a recognition that technology is imploding and changing everything about our lives.

4th-Industrial-Revolution-300x225In describing the ways social media and technology have redefined communication, in 2009 journalist Graeme Wood said that  “Change has never happened this fast before, and it will never be this slow again.”  

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, coined the phrase “fourth industrial revolution” in his 2016 best seller.  This is techie-speak for disruptive technologies and trends like robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and the Internet of Things – i.e. everyday devices like doorbells and thermostats that you can control remotely – that are changing how we live and work.  This Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing together digital, physical and biological systems.  It will open up our minds to all kinds of new things:  Mobile supercomputing; Artificially-intelligent robots; Self-driving cars; Neuro-technological brain enhancements; Genetic editing.  We can see the evidence of these revolutionary changes all around us – and it’s happening faster and faster.

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Few would argue that President Trump engages in what could be described colloquially as “rhetorical hyperbole” when logged on to his Twitter account.   But a recent court finding that dismissed a defamation suit filed against Trump by porn star Stormy Daniels, on the grounds that a tweet by the president could legally be described in those terms, rather than as potentially factual statements—defamation cases require that a statement be factually false—could have a significant effect on how libel law applies to social media going forward.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, alleges that she and her daughter were threatened on the street in Las Vegas for agreeing to participate in an In Touch magazine article about her past relationship with the president. “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,” she was allegedly told in May 2011.

Trumps-Stormy-Tweet-wasnt-defamation-300x199After Trump’s election, Daniels commissioned a sketch artist to create a rendering of the person who had threatened her, and she released the sketch publicly on April 17, 2017.  On the next day, a tweet from @RealDonaldTrump read, “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for fools (but they know it)!”

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