Glenn Beck Sued for Defamation with Malice by Saudi Arabian Student
20-year-old Abdulrahman Alharbi, a Saudi Arabian student who
was injured when the bombs went off at the finish line of the 2013
Boston Marathon, is suing Glenn Beck…
Alharbi became a suspect for a brief time — along with many others — and his apartment was searched, his lawyer Peter J. Haley notes “with his permission”. However, even after investigators cleared him and focused on the Tsarnaev brothers, Glenn Beck and his website The Blaze kept hammering on him, saying that he was a known terrorist.
In court documents filed by Alharbi’s lawyer on March 28 in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, the lawyer charged, “The defendant Glenn Beck, with active participation of distributor defendants, repeatedly and falsely identified Mr. Alharbi as an active participant in the crimes that were committed on April 15, 2013, repeatedly questioned the motives of officials in failing to pursue or detain Mr. Alharbi and falsely accused Alharbi of being a criminal who had funded the attacks that took place at the Boston Marathon. Those statements were made widely and publicly. The statements were false and caused grave injury to the plaintiff.”
“The statements made by Beck were false… The statements made by Beck were published widely to others throughout the United States and the world.” Thus, the defendant, who says he has been harassed and called a murderer, a child killer, and a terrorist based upon Beck’s false statements, has been substantially and severely damaged.
And of course, because our media can’t sort out yet that they shouldn’t just run with any story on the Breitbarts and Blazes of the webs, Beck’s statements were repeated, spreading the damage outside of the crazy bubble that is the wingnut end of the web.
The statements were false, and presumably since he had been cleared, the lawyer charges that these statements were made with “actual malice.” Mr. Alharbi asks for the court to determine the amount of damages in addition to court costs, attorney fees and interest.
Actual malice is needed because Glenn Beck is a public figure. Within the context of defamation, actual malice is “knowing that it is false; or acting with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity.”
Certainly in this case, the rest of the media moved on once federal authorities cleared Mr. Alharbi, and yet Glenn Beck continued to gin up a witch hunt against him. Actual malice is very difficult to prove, and this explains why Glenn Beck is still allowed to speak publicly, given his past littered with stochastic terrorism.
The Digital Media Law Project explains:
… the plaintiff must produce clear and convincing evidence that the defendant actually knew the information was false or entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication. In making this determination, a court will look for evidence of the defendant’s state of mind at the time of publication and will likely examine the steps he took in researching, editing, and fact checking his work. It is generally not sufficient, however, for a plaintiff to merely show that the defendant didn’t like her, failed to contact her for comment, knew she had denied the information, relied on a single biased source, or failed to correct the statement after publication.Boston Magazine gave background courtesy of an interview Mr. Alharbi did a month after he was first suspected, where he explained that the media got his full address and publicized it:
According to The Islamic Monthly, who interviewed Alharbi one month after he was first implicated as a possible suspect, “the media discovered his full address and publicized it while filming the FBI search of his apartment. By early Tuesday, reports of his full name and photos from his Facebook account were circulated.”It’s tough to imagine how terrorized Mr. Alharbi has felt since being continually targeted as a “murderer” when he has been cleared, and was in fact himself injured at the scene. Americans of late love to rush to judgment, appoint themselves investigators, juries and judge before the evidence is even in. We have become at times digital lynch mobs. And while it probably feels justified when one thinks they are on the “right” side, everyone thinks they are on the right side. It’s one thing if authorities are really ignoring evidence as they were in Steubenville, but they also need time to gather and process evidence. Glenn Beck had no evidence to suggest the authorities were not doing their job, so he invented a reason.
He was later exonerated by The Washington Post, and authorities said he was merely a “witness,” but Alharbi told The Islamic Monthly he feared for his life after being pegged as a possible terrorist. “The responsible officials quickly concluded that Mr. Alharbi, other then being injured in the attacks, had no involvement in the attacks,” his lawyer said.
Glenn Beck has been a scourge on this country for years now. He is irresponsible and reckless as a course of business. He makes a lot of money stirring up fake conspiracies for the paranoid and the foolish — but the frightening thing is that for the mentally unbalanced, Beck’s circus land mind is a salve. Mr. Alharbi’s lawyers might bring into evidence victims who were killed by “lone wolf” Beck listeners. There are a few too many of them for comfort.
No one deserves this suit more than Glenn Beck. He built that karma.
Complaint:
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