2008 June 10

Manno v. Henry, 2008 BCSC 738

The British Columbia Court held that an article published on the defendant newspaper’s Internet site, which was identical in content to the hard copy newspaper article but  did not name or picture any of the plaintiffs, falsely defamed three of the five plaintiffs by asserting that persons at the house located at a specified street address in Abbotsford had been carrying on a marijuana growing operation, had been suspected of being the victims of a pot rip-off, and had failed to cooperate with police as a means of covering up this illegal activity. Although none of the plaintiffs was either named or pictured in the Internet version of the article, three of the plaintiffs had “the necessary connection to the property so as to lead persons acquainted with them reasonably to conclude from the Internet article that they were the victims referred to.” However, the court noted that it was likely that some of the persons who also read the newspaper article had seen the hard copy article (which was accompanied by a photograph depicting three of the plaintiffs).  The Internet article was held to exacerbate, to a minor degree, the defamation by the newspaper article of all five plaintiffs who were defamed by the hard copy article.