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Republicans Have Nominated Hard-Right Candidates Across the Country. Not Everyone’s Happy About It.
A few days ago, a freelance journalist named Nancy Levine tweeted inaccurately that Sherillyn Fisher, the wife of well-known investor Ken Fisher, had donated to the campaign of Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race. Shortly thereafter, she got a threatening letter from a lawyer representing the Fishers, a letter that said that neither of the Fishers had ever donated, directly or indirectly, to Mastriano or his campaign, and that Levine should delete the tweet or face a defamation suit. Unsurprisingly, she deleted it.
Now, the fact that the Fishers wanted the tweet deleted may not be that surprising, given that it wasn’t true. But the fact that they claimed the tweet was defamatory is actually quite interesting, since defamation requires not just that a statement be false, but also that it do damage to a person’s reputation. And the language the letter used was especially striking: it said that the statement constituted “defamation per se,” meaning that simply saying that the Fishers had donated to Mastriano would unquestionably do them “reputational injury.”
This is, when you think about it, a rather remarkable statement, not about the Fishers so much as about Mastriano. After all, if someone tweeted inaccurately that a…
