2011 May 12

Blanc c. Éditions Bang Bang inc, 2011 QCCS 2624

The Quebec Superior Court dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by a specialist in web marketing including social media who had undergone a male-to-female sex change operation. The plaintiff and a columnist for the Montreal newspaper La Presse exchanged barbs on their respective Internet websites concerning the merits of blogging. Commenting about that online exchange, the defendant Bang Bang, an internet magazine, published an article illustrated by The Sacrifice of Isaac, the well-known painting attributed to Caravaggio which depicts Abraham on the point of sacrificing his son Isaac to God. However, the painting was digitally altered by superimposing the plaintiff’s face on Abraham (but retaining Abraham’s beard) and by superimposing the face of the La Presse columnist on Isaac. The plaintiff alleged that because her image in the altered painting was bearded (recall she had transgendered from a male), the publication exposed her to humiliation and ridicule and caused her to suffer significant emotional distress. Rejecting the defamation claim, the Court ruled that the defendant’s website article including the altered painting represented a legitimate exercise of freedom of expression about the public online debate between the plaintiff and the newspaper columnist. The Court concluded that in this context, the reasonable reader would not have interpreted the article and altered painting as an attack on the plaintiff’s trans-gendered status, but rather as an ironic commentary about the differences between the plaintiff and the columnist about the virtues of blogging.