Libel Lawsuit (Related to Causing-Suicide Allegations) Between Two Trans Political Commentators,

"Defendant White would go on to accuse Ms. Erlick of sexually abusing and—most importantly, including by Defendant White’s own reckoning—causing the death of the person (Danie) who made the accusation."

It's Erlick v. White (@EliErlick v. @BlaireWhite), just filed today in S.D.N.Y.:

3. Defendant Blaire White is a notorious YouTuber that promotes farright conspiracy  theories and has traded on the fact that she is transgender to push hatred against other members of the trans community….

10. Ms. Erlick is a trans woman, activist, and graduate student.

11. Defendant White has a history of attacking other trans individuals, recognized by New York Courts. "[S]ince January 2017, White has intermittently created and uploaded episodes of a video series entitled 'Triggering Tr[*]nnies' which features taunts of people who identify as 'trans.'… In this Court's view, all of these comments may be fairly described as 'queer slurs' because they were clearly intended as insults." Straka v. Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender Cmty. Ctr., Inc., 2020 N.Y. Slip Op. 32116 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 2020).

12. In or around August of 2022, Defendant White sent a private, social media message to Ms. Erlick stating her (White's) intention to create one of those a video about Erlick.

13. That message read: "Hey Eli, any statement about the allegations of sexual abuse and/or your admitted plan to illegally give children drugs? I'll be doing a video on this. Thanks!"

14. Ms. Erlick responded in relevant part by providing a link responding, among other things by linking a full response, saying, "I wrote a response years ago before they [e.g. the person who made an accusation of sexual abuse] deleted their accusations."

15. Defendant White and Ms. Erlick exchanged several more messages before the conversation concluded, demonstrating that Defendant White had seen, or had the opportunity to see, the message described above.

16. As detailed below, Defendant White would go on to accuse Ms. Erlick of sexually abusing and—most importantly, including by Defendant White's own reckoning—causing the death of the person (Danie) who made the accusation.

17. The link that Ms. Erlick provided to Defendant White takes the viewer to a Tumblr post authored and published by Ms. Erlick on August 5th, 2016, and edited by Ms. Erlick in December, 2018.

18. The top of the post, and immediately viewable upon clicking the link, indicates that Danie was alive.

19. Upon information and belief, Defendant White read and understood that Danie was alive.

20. Danie is alive.

21. Had Defendant White undertaken even the most cursory diligence—let alone industry standard diligence—she would have also been able to discover on her own that Danie was alive….

There's more here. As I read the complaint, the specific statement that Erlick is alleging were libelous were that:

Defendant White's statements were untrue and defamatory in that they falsely reported that Danie is deceased, and in that a reasonable person would infer Defendant White's statements to mean that Ms. Erlick had caused that death.

That part of the Complaint doesn't list the allegations of sexual abuse or of "having a legal drug trafficking scheme aimed at minors" as being libelous, though from the tenor of the rest of the Complaint it appears that Erlick is denying those allegations as well.

Comments

[Frank Drackman]

Cat! I mean "Sword" fight!!!!!

[ReaderY]

One suspects Professor Volokh enjoys weird libel lawsuits the way other people enjoy cat videos.

[TwelveInchPianist]

The drug trafficking allegation appears to be a reference to this.

The plaintiff's not explicitly denying the rape? That seems odd, if the allegation if false. Is a statement of opinion with a false but non-libelous premise actionable?

[Dr. Ed 2]

I'm not even going to try to figure this one out beyond saying that graduate school in the past 20-30 years has turned into a predatory hell.

I'm not going to say any more than this, knowing that the usual suspects will demand that I present facts that they damn well know that I neither (legally) can nor (ethically) ever would.

But grad school has become hell....

[Lee Moore]

20. Danie is alive.

21. Had Defendant White undertaken even the most cursory diligence—let alone industry standard diligence—she would have also been able to discover on her own that Danie was alive….

This, of course, assumes without evidence that life and death are part of some objective fabric of reality, and completely ignores the subjective or metaphorical stance that one might take on these matters. After all, one can be “deadnamed” repeatedly, and yet still walk around without difficulty. Trans folk manage to survive, with consummate ease, attempts to “erase” or “eliminate” them without displaying any of the traditional signs of erasure or elimination (ie not being around any more.)

I imagine that all Defendant White needs to do is point out that Plaintiff Erlick is not the sort of guy who takes things too literally, viz his insistence on calling himself a trans “woman” – and so can hardly insist on everybody else being held to dyed in the wool literalism when they use words like “alive” and “dead.”

If you can be a metaphorical woman while actually being a man, you can certainly be metaphorically dead while actually being alive.

[John Cuyle]

“3. Defendant Blaire White is a notorious YouTuber that promotes farright conspiracy theories and has traded on the fact that she is transgender to push hatred against other members of the trans community….

10. Ms. Erlick is a trans woman, activist, and graduate student.”

I’m confused. Is White a woman or a man? Is Erlick a woman or a man? Such simple questions of fact should not be difficult to discern from a synopsis of a libel lawsuit.

[Lee Moore]

I’m confused. Is White a woman or a man? Is Erlick a woman or a man? Such simple questions of fact should not be difficult to discern from a synopsis of a libel lawsuit.

Just think of Genderese as a foreign language, like Portuguese.

This is the plaintiff’s spiel. The plaintiff is trans, so the spiel is in Genderese rather than in English. In Genderese “woman” refers to someone with a “gender identity” of “woman”. The expression “trans woman” specifies someone with a “gender identity” of “woman” who has “transitted” ie made a journey from their “sex assigned at birth.” “Sex assigned at birth” in Genderese means the same as “sex” in English, though it carries a connotation that at birth the doctor “assigned” the sex arbitrarily, whereas in English “sex” carries the connotation of objective biological reality. In order to have transitted, a “woman” must have started with a sex assigned at birth of male.

The meanings “she” and “her” in Genderese follow the meaning of “woman”. They relate to gender identity not to sex.

Thus in Genderese, the plaintiff is a woman. In English he is a man.

When the plaintiff’s spiel refers to White it is still written in Genderese. Thus the expression “she is transgender” identifies her, in Genderese, as someone with the gender identity of “woman” (thus “she”) but who is “transgender”, ie who has made the same journey as the plaintiff, from a “sex assigned at birth” which was male.

Thus in Genderese, the defendant (White) is also a woman. In English he too is a man.

Federal Rules of Procedure permit litigants to file motions in Genderese without an accompanying English translation.

[John F. Carr]

Stripped of drama and excess verbiage, I understand the case to boil down to:

Schrodinger accused Plaintiff of something evil then deleted a message containing the accusation. Plaintiff posted a response denying the allegations, or some of them. Defendant accused Schrodinger of being dead due to Plaintiff's evil acts. Plaintiff accused Schrodinger of being alive. Despite being aware of Plaintiff's statements, Defendant persisted.