Additionally, he tried to blame Rajala for another woman’s reply on the thread, which linked to a mug shot of a convicted rapist. Despite the mug shot link displaying another man’s name and photo, D’Ambrosio claimed he had been defamed and had “suffered emotional distress, emotional loss, loss of professional opportunities, and damage to his reputation and relationships.”
His goal, Hamilton’s opinion noted, was to sue “anyone remotely associated with those posts for all possible, imaginable claims, including the woman who dated him and her parents, women commenting on posts, the operators of the Facebook group, and Facebook itself.”
In his blog, Trent acknowledged that these Facebook groups “were ostensibly created to help women navigate dating safely,” but he claimed that some women abuse the groups to instead trigger harassment campaigns by accusing innocent men of spreading sexually transmitted infections or forcing women to having abortions.
“They’re facilitating having people contact their bosses, their employers, to take the harm even further,” Trent alleged.
Importantly, D’Ambrosio failed to allege any concrete harm caused by the post, and there is no evidence that the post led to improper contact in the real world.
He also never argued that anything that the women said about him was false. Extremely late in the game, his lawyers tried to save his case by arguing that it was possible that the screenshot Rajala shared was doctored. But the panel rejected that argument since D’Ambrosio had ample opportunity to dispute the text’s authenticity earlier in the litigation, and never did it before oral arguments during the appeal.
An Internet law expert monitoring the case, Eric Goldman, explained that D’Ambrosio’s case is similar to other lawsuits in which men have tried and failed to have critical posts removed from “Spill the Tea”-branded Facebook groups like the Chicago-based “Are We Dating the Same Guy” group. Repeatedly, these men fail, largely because posts like Rajala’s are considered opinions protected by the First Amendment and defamation laws in states like Illinois.
