2011 January 26

Vigna v Levant, 2011 ONSC 629

This decision of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice concerned an award of costs to the plaintiff who recovered a judgment in the amount of $25,000 for defamation damages plus an order that the defamatory publications be removed from the defendant’s website. Although the plaintiff was substantially successful, his claim for punitive damages was not allowed and some of the publications at issue in the action were found either not to be defamatory or were protected by other defences. In addition to noting that legal issues involved in defamation litigation are more complex than the typical lawsuit, the court remarked on the factual complexities arising from the defendant’s blog postings relating to various legal proceedings. The court held that the plaintiff should be awarded costs on a substantial indemnity basis because the defendant “published defamatory statements about [the plaintiff] for an ulterior purpose and his actions were malicious, and also because [the plaintiff] obtained a result after trial, which exceeded the financial terms of his offers to settle by a substantial amount and included the remedy of the removal of the defamatory comments from [the defendant’s] website… [the pre-trial] offers made by [the plaintiff] were reasonable and a better or equivalent result was obtained after trial.”