4.2.12 WC: 191694 Chapter 10: Speech that Conflicts with Reputational and Privacy Rights Defamation: “He that filches from me my good name:” Whenever a Holocaust denier or defamer of the Jews spews out his poison, I get calls and emails demanding that I sue them for defaming the Jewish people or committing a “blood libel.” But under our First Amendment only an individual can be defamed. There is no such thing as group libel. In other words you can say all you want about “the Jews,” “the Democratic Party,” “the Blacks,” “the Gays,” and “the women”—obnoxious as these generalizations might be. An anti- Semite is constitutionally free to spread the blood libel against the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, so long as he is careful not to accuse a specific individual of killing Christian children for their blood. This is not true in other countries that do have group libel laws and other rules prohibiting racist statements. Not so under our First Amendment. In addition to the defamatory statement being directed against a specific individual, it must also cast him in a negative light. That used to be easier to define than it is today. For example, when a newspaper in the segregated Deep South made a typographical error and described a white man as a “colored gentleman,” instead of a “cultured gentleman,” that error was defamatory, since describing a white person as colored clearly could damage his career and hurt his position. Today, no court would consider it defamatory to mistakenly report on someone’s race. It’s a little more complicated when it comes to sexual preference. If a newspaper were to characterize a heterosexual politician as gay, that might well hurt his electoral chances, but courts would be reluctant today to rule that being called “gay” is an insult. The same is true of other former words of opprobrium that have lost or decreased their negative connotations over the years. In addition to being damaging, a defamation must also be untrue. This wasn’t al