Courts Draw Hard Lines on Online Defamation, False Accusations, and First Amendment Limits

The Internet Made Defamation Cheap. Courts Are Making It Expensive Again.

You can destroy someone's life with a single Instagram comment. No evidence required. No accountability — until now.

Three recent court decisions, all covered by the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason, show courts taking online defamation seriously while wrestling with where free speech ends and real harm begins.

Case 1: 'LOL' Is NOT a Legal Shield

Dusty Button was a world-renowned ballet dancer with nearly 500,000 Instagram followers. Her husband Mitchell ran a successful automotive brand with a similar following. In July 2021, they were sued in Nevada for $131 million over sexual assault allegations — a civil lawsuit, widely covered by outlets including Good Morning America.

Key fact: The Buttons were never arrested, never charged, never jailed. It was a civil suit. Period.

On January 27, 2025, a man named Lopresti — who followed the Buttons' public-response Instagram page — jumped into the comments on an unrelated post about Mitchell's car work and wrote that the Buttons were "locked up for some f*cked up stuff." That post was shared 322 times and reached hundreds of thousands of people.

One of Lopresti's followers then escalated it, claiming the Buttons were "locked up for human trafficking." Completely fabricated.

Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California refused to dismiss the Buttons' defamation lawsuit, according to Reason's coverage of the decision. The court ruled the comment — regardless of its casual, jokey framing — constitutes a potentially actionable false statement of fact.

The legal lesson: calling someone a criminal when they have NOT been convicted is defamation. Putting "LOL" in front of it doesn't change that.

Case 2: YouTube Narration Can Be Defamatory Even When the Footage Is Real

Attorney John Randolph has bipolar disorder. In August 2021, during a documented manic episode, he approached a child at a park and made incoherent statements — including falsely believing the child was his son. Police were called. Randolph pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace. Not child predation. Not anything close.

Two years later, a YouTube channel called Explore with Us (EWU) Media posted a 14-minute video of police bodycam footage from the incident. So far, so legal. But then they added voiceover narration calling Randolph a "deranged suspect" hiding a "most disgusting secret," saying he could "relapse" at any time, and framing the whole incident to strongly imply he was a pedophile.

The video got millions of views. Randolph received death threats. He eventually shut down his entire law practice.

The Washington Court of Appeals ruled, according to Reason, that a reasonable jury could find EWU Media's narration — not the footage itself, but the editorial spin layered on top — was defamatory. The "gist" of the video implied Randolph had a history of child predation. That gist was unsupported and false.

EWU Media hid behind real footage to push a false narrative. The footage was true. The implications were not. Courts are now saying that framing can be defamation even when the raw facts aren't.

Case 3: First Amendment Protects Even Abusive Ex-Spouses From Blanket Online Gag Orders

A man named Couto — who had multiple domestic violence protection orders issued against him for screaming at his family, throwing objects, and waving a knife — posted a YouTube video in 2024 trying to reconnect with his now-adult son Aiden.

A Washington trial court granted new protection orders AND issued a sweeping prohibition: Couto could not post any videos or media referring to his ex-wife Karina, Aiden, or his minor daughter NC "in any manner whatsoever."

The Washington Court of Appeals said: not so fast, according to Reason's coverage of the Asbach v. Couto decision.

The court upheld the protection orders themselves. Couto's behavior was real and documented. But the blanket speech ban — covering any future mention of these people, in any context — was ruled an unconstitutional prior restraint that must be narrowed.

Law professor David Ardia, writing in the William & Mary Law Review, outlined the framework: injunctions against speech are permissible only when narrowly tailored to specific, adjudicated false statements. Broad gag orders on entire topics are a different animal — one that courts have historically treated as presumptively unconstitutional.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

Most reporting on online defamation focuses on either Big Tech platform liability or high-profile celebrity cases. That framing misses the real story.

Ordinary people — a ballet dancer, a small-town lawyer, a divorced father — are having their lives wrecked by anonymous comments and monetized outrage content. The legal system is adapting, though imperfectly.

The First Amendment Encyclopedia at MTSU traces criminal libel law back to the English Star Chamber. Free speech has never meant consequence-free speech. Even John Peter Zenger's famous 1735 acquittal was about truth as a defense — not immunity for lies.

Today's defamation defendants aren't newspapers with editors and lawyers. They're people with smartphones and zero skin in the game. As law professor Ardia noted, money damages don't deter someone with no money. Courts are exploring whether injunctions — stop-what-you're-doing orders — can fill that gap without becoming censorship tools.

The Verdict

If you type a false claim that someone is a criminal, a pedophile, or a trafficker — and you have no factual basis for it — you are not exercising free speech. You are potentially committing defamation. The "it's just the internet" defense is dead.

At the same time, courts issuing broad speech gag orders on people they don't like — even genuinely bad people — need to pump the brakes. The First Amendment doesn't have a carve-out for those the court disapproves of.

The law is figuring this out. Regular people are paying the price while it does.