When a man described as a “prominent businessman” in the U.S. and Canada at the “pinnacle of the commercial real estate brokerage world” found that several clients wouldn’t do business with him, he decided to Google himself to find out if something spooked them from dealing with him. He did this in April 2007 and discovered that a website called “RipoffReport.com wrote a report in April 2006 which falsely called him a con man who was “convicted of child molestation in 1984.”
Google is ordered to pay a businessman $500,000 for incorrectly interpreting Canadian law
A judge in Canada orders Google to pay $500,000 for an incorrect interpretation of Canadian law
The plaintiff was awarded $500,000 for moral injuries. He was not awarded punitive damages, said the judge, since Google had acted in good faith when it ignored the man’s requests to take down the posts because it thought it was legally allowed to do so. Still, the judge described the plaintiff’s experience as a “waking nightmare,” and noted that because of Google’s refusal to remove the “defamatory posts,” the plaintiff “found himself helpless in a surreal and excruciating contemporary online ecosystem as he lived through a dark odyssey to have the defamatory post removed from public circulation.”
Google was also ordered to remove the defamatory post on search results that appear in Quebec
Not only did the businessman lose clients and potential deals, his personal relationships suffered because of the false online claims that he was a pedophile. And one of his sons had to distance himself from his father because he too worked in real estate.
The judge ruled that the businessman’s identity can not be released by Google for 45 days although that ruling can be appealed. More importantly, the judge did rule that Google must remove all links to the defamatory post in search results viewable in Quebec. The judge also said that he does not see his ruling leading the way to more lawsuits seeking to force Google to remove certain links to defamatory posts.
