2011 January 4

Daboll v. DeMarco, 2011 ONSC 1

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice awarded the plaintiff lawyer $50,000 general damages over malicious and false allegations published in local community and shopping newspapers as well as on the website of the National Coalition for Law Societies Reform and on a related website, Dirty Lawyer Registry Ontario. The Court found that “individual fragments of the advertisement arguably had some basis in fact, but they were expressed and juxtaposed in a manner [the court found] to be inconsistent with the truth.” Damages were aggravated by a number of factors, including the dissemination of additional material on websites accessible through the internet. “The internet postings continued to be available for viewing to the time of trial. The wide circulation of defamatory statements through the internet has been recognized as a potential aggravating factor in libel cases …” The Court also granted a permanent injunction requiring any statements relating to the plaintiff to be removed from the websites.