(Newswire.net — March 29, 2014) Clayton, Georgia — Atlanta, Georgia
After more than three weeks of grueling testimony in a defamation lawsuit in Atlanta-area Cobb County Superior Court, Georgia by high-caliber eye witnesses, event after event of Stan Cottrell’s historic runs over decades throughout the world were shown to be true. Yet while Cottrell has been lauded by Presidents and Kings, by many U.S. Congressional Citations and foreign officials for the unifying bridges he’s helped build through Friendship Runs, the Defendants called it all a lie. Essentially everything.
Stanley W. Cottrell, Jr. was awarded $635,000 on November 7 for Defendants’ defamatory conduct and invasion of privacy beginning 2010, but nothing has been paid yet. Over four months later, the defamation remains online and ranking high in Google even without any new content, and continuing damages are reported as “crippling.”
Yet in the confusion of this relatively new area of internet law, in spite of the defamation ruling, the judge did not order actual removal of the defamatory content post-judgment. It remains.
Recently, Thomson-Reuters’ The Knowledge Effect published Jean Sica’s law editorial article “Cyber-bullying injures long distance run career” about this case, with WestLaw link. But it involves far more than cyber-bullying. Testimony reveals this as an orchestrated defamation assault online and offline seeking to deny and destroy a 70-year-old’s life history of achievements.
Testimony was presented of damage to Cottrell’s livelihood and family, as well as sponsorship prospects for the planned Great Global Friendship Run. Any multi-year funding delays also affect the intended Run beneficiaries – orphans and abandoned children.
Electronic Frontier Foundation defines defamation as “… a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation, and published ‘with fault,’ meaning as a result of negligence or malice.” Defamation covers both slander (oral) and libel (written).
Traverse Legal outlines evidentiary requirements for defamatory statements: harm to reputation, made without due diligence into the truth or else with full knowledge of its falsity, and if against a celebrity or public figure, made with reckless disregard of the truth or intention to do harm.
When the internet is engaged with a literal web of posts and comments in concerted action, using high-traffic online properties and email broadcasts, the impact is far greater than with a front-page headline in a major newspaper that is printed today and thrown away tomorrow. Online content has worldwide exposure, multiplied when content links are pinged, bookmarked, or posted in social media to encourage sharing virally.
Here, eye-catching online headlines were displayed for the entire World Wide Web of Cottrell’s international and U.S. audiences to see and run away in disgust. Witnesses and online comments show people did.
Witness documents show a couple of Defendants joined a major international running forum aimed at competitive runners (which they admittedly are not). They came in on cue for a defamatory “scam runner” thread using fake identities to build comment interaction, repeatedly exposing their scam claims to the worldwide running community.
When a forum member, “Owen W,” retracted his prior claim of his mother being scammed, the retraction was dismissed as irrelevant by a defendant-family-member feeding the defamatory forum comment frenzy. Owen said he showed his mother the [defendant] site “the truth about Stan,” and she immediately said that wasn’t the man who came to see her. Instead, “she was positive it wasn’t Stan…this person was British and did a hard sell.” (One defendant is British.) Yet the “scam runner” headline remains high on Google today with its defamatory message.
Defendants and their family members shared their own “Cottrell story” on high-traffic sites in such far-flung locations as Australia and Germany as well as Google Groups, multiple forums and social media accounts. People who never heard Cottrell’s name before appeared appreciative for the “scam” warning.
One online witness says this all reminds her of Adolph Hitler’s statement: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
Online publication provides that “frequency” by effectively re-publishing daily any libelous or misleading posts, while comments add fresh content, boosting rank. Online promotion tactics can continue to prop the original content’s “re-published position” on Google long after a comment thread is locked or closed.
The moral in this case for online searchers is to check facts before assuming negative claims are true, and especially before sharing them online where gossip spreads virally and damages are magnified.
Cyber-bullying and internet defamation threaten to become an increasing problem in today’s fast-paced online and mobile world. The effects cannot be washed away easily. Real people and real lives are affected, and online content remains emblazened to perpetuate the attack, especially if promoted. Cottrell’s damages are a case in point.
For more on the facts of Stan Cottrell’s 200,000 miles of runs since 1955 and the proven power of his international Friendship Runs, see the Trendsetters article that just appeared on NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX and other major national media affiliates: http://smallbusinesstrendsetters.com/ultra-distance-runner-stan-cottrell-reveals-power-of-friendship-runs/ or check out the charitable 501(c)(3) organization, Friendship Sports Association’s website: FriendshipSports.org.