1badmf wrote on Mar 27, 2023, 05:54:
i kinda skimmed the comments, but i can say that there was no judgement here so there was no standard of malice to be applied. it was a settlement to make the case go away. the only role the judge has is to approve it.

that being said, as someone else mentioned, the women must've been fucked up shit's creek to agree to these terms. they admitted they lied AND they paid him a big settlement. they need to get a better lawyer cuz when big corps drop big settlements they NEVER admit guilt. i'm curious what he sued for cuz it must've been massive, to get them to 'only' pay out 7 figs and a public apology.

Correct, there was no judgement, no standard of malice held. But usually settlements are either "this is going to cost more to go to court than to make you go away" or "we potentially are going to lose, and lose big, if we go to court" logic. Since the defendants were being represented Pro Bono, I doubt going to court would have cost 7 figures in legal fees. Which probably leaves the second.

My wild-assed guess is that there's some kind of private conversation where they either talk about consenting or enjoying the interactions and then pivoted at some point later on. Because as others have said, defamation of a public figure requires establishing malice or gross negligence. If you're giving a first hand account of an incident, I don't think gross negligence can be used- you didn't not bother to find out the truth to a liable degree, you know if it happened or not. You can suggest malice if someone went from "I wish we had gone farther" to "He 100% tried to sexually assault me".

A non-zero chance is that this really did go down the way they said, but due to their own public and private reactions under duress or denial or whatever, and a lack of any kind of contemporaneous records to back up the accusation, there simply isn't any effective defense against the accusation. Which, if that's the case, I hate to say it, but if you can't support an accusation you probably shouldn't make it. For example, I *could* make an allegation about a famous actor about something that occurred when they were young, because I was there, but I can't prove it, and so I won't, because I don't want to be sued.

As for their lawyers sucking, that might not have been the case. He might have been asking for much more to settle, and then said he'll take like... half that for a public retraction. If you're trying to recover from defamation a public retraction is worth more than money arguably.