Shock Attack: Protecting Your Business Reputation in the Internet Age

Welcome to Your Business, Accelerated! Digitally remastered with AI, Your Business, Accelerated! is the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs ready to scale smart. Hosted by Attorney Shaune B. Arnold, it delivers strategic business insights, legal frameworks, and real-world solutions to help you operate with clarity and confidence. Get actionable guidance to protect, grow, and optimize your business…one smart move at a time.

What do you do when your business is blindsided by online attacks? Attorney Shaune breaks down the legal essentials of defamation, slander, and libel—and shares how one client turned a reputation crisis into a comeback. Learn practical steps to protect your name, your brand, and your future. 

Transcript

Hello, everyone! And welcome, …welcome …once again …to Your Business, Accelerated! I am your host, Attorney, Shaune B Arnold, reminding you, as always, …to maximize your competence to get the confidence you need to succeed.

I want to start by telling you a bit about myself. I’m a California business attorney. For this reason, I do want to caution anyone who might be within the sound of my voice that any legal topics that I discuss are presented to you within the context of California law. If you live in another state, if you live in another country, if you live on another planet, you're going to have to find an attorney in your local jurisdiction, and ask them what the nuances might be for your particular state, your particular country, your particular planet.

Let me tell you what we're doing here on Your Business, Accelerated! We meet right here weekly to discuss business. The show is always very short. I know how busy you are. I don't want to take up too much of your time.

We meet here weekly for 10 to 15 minutes and I talk to you about some business concept that I've been thinking about for the last week, some news item that I heard about, or some legal concept that people have been asking me about. I then talk to you about those things and see if I can be a resource to you by giving you some tips on handling those areas of your business.

So, let's begin tonight by talking about when a business experiences a shock attack. Shock attack, not shark attack. Shock attack.

I want to talk to you about protecting your name and likeness in the Internet age. And that's not easy to do because anyone can say anything they want to about you. It’s difficult for you to disprove it, unless you have some sort of exculpatory evidence that you can throw online as an attachment to whatever it Is that they said about you. But in general, it's really important for you to understand the underpinnings of defamation of character, so that you know what to do if something like this happens to you.

I have a client named Melanie, we'll call her, and she owns a dance studio. And Melanie found herself the target of an internet sniper, and this is an individual that has repeatedly listed really ugly and very damaging remarks about her business on the internet. Her business began to suffer under the weight of these what she says is unfounded and unsubstantiated accusations that somebody placed there, that had in the past made some personal advances toward her, and she rebuffed them.

Melanie called me. She was near panic wondering how this person could get away with what he was doing. So, I sat with her for a minute, and we discussed the law surrounding defamation of character.

The first thing she asked me, is what is that? What is defamation of character? She asked me, Is that anything like slander? Is it anything like libel? And so I explained to her, Yes, it is. That’s exactly what it is. If the defamatory statement is being made by word of mouth, it’s slander. If the person writes it down, it’s libel. Either way, it’s defamation of character when a false statement is knowingly made about you to a third party. The speaker knows it’s not true, or they act with reckless disregard as to whether it's true or not.

So, defamation is actually the communication of a false statement that makes a claim that either someone states as a fact or that they imply to be true, that may give somebody or their business or their product, their group, their government or even their nation a negative image.

What you need to understand if this happens to you is that you don't have to take physical action and hurt somebody. You really don't. There are resources that are legal, and quite frankly, if you hurt somebody in the pocketbook, you're really hurting them where they live, you know? Fighting them in the press may be what they're looking for. So, what happens if you are defamed?

The act of actually communicating this written or spoken defamatory statement is called publicizing it, or publication of that statement. And every time someone says something that is defamatory, each separate statement is separately actionable. That's very important, because if you have to sue somebody, you don't want to just say they went to the club and talked about you. You want to say they went all over town and talked about you. You want to be able to pull in witnesses, newsletters, blogs, and other documentation from all over town that shows that somebody has really said or done something that's very unfair and it was done deliberately or recklessly to hurt your reputation.

You have to know, like I told Melanie, you don’t have to stand for it. To the extent that someone is saying something that's unfounded, you can stop them with a cease and desist letter and a threat to sue them and hold them liable for the damage that they're causing to your reputation.

Remember, every time they say that horrible thing, that's called a publication, every time they write it that's called a publication. The courts are divided as to whether each newspaper is a separate publication. They have certainly decided that each copy of a particular newspaper is not a separate publication. But if the person you’re suing published the defamatory statement in the post and then they did it again in the Times, and then once more each for luck in USA Today, the Herald and the Huffington Post, then you definitely have argument that they that they have separate publications they should be liable for.

The courts have determined that in that some utterances are so vile, so beyond the pale and beneath the salt, that if someone says them about you and that statement is false, you'll notice I keep saying false statement, because a true statement is an automatic defense to a claim of libel or slander.

So I'm saying if someone says something false about you, if they falsely accuse you of having committed a crime, or having committed some immoral act, or lying or cheating on your spouse or having some loathsome disease like herpes of the mouth, genital herpes, or AIDS or something like that, or being incompetent in your profession or dishonest in business, any of these kinds of false utterances can be called slander per se. If the bad guy speaks these words, it’s slander per se and if he writes them down, it’s libel per se.

Now, if the statements can be proven to be false, then you don't have to prove that the person who said them had the actual malicious intent to harm you. All you have to prove is that they're false and that they fall into this special category.

If the statements are false, that person will be held responsible for the damage that they cause to your reputation. I sent these defamation law understandings to Melanie, and with my assistance, we sent a cease and desist letter to the person that was writing all of these things about her. They were easy to find because they all but identified themselves by the way that they posted their comments.

Melanie also directly responded online at the website where the offending postings were being made. She made her case for herself, and she attached some video that showed that she did provide the service that they said she didn't provide. There was some video of that person literally standing in her studio being coached in dance.

We posted those kinds of things, and we worked through getting her hooked up with a company that works on repairing reputations. Basically, these companies will create a number of press releases and articles on your behalf. They sing your praises, and then put these press releases and articles on separate websites, and then launch these websites. They maximize the search engine optimization on all of these websites. And what that does is push that offending post down to like the third or fourth page. So, the chances are someone will never see that posting about you, if you can push it far enough down.

So, that's what we did with Melanie. We got her hooked up with one of those reputation companies, and they created the websites for her, and they created the press releases, and they search engine optimized all of these things and her own website using the same keyword phrases that they used to optimize all of these manufactured phrases that we got created for Melanie, and we successfully push all of those negative comments all the way down to third, fourth, or even the fifth page, so that it wasn't such a horrible happenstance in the end. 

The cease and desist letter, of course, helped Melanie very much, because this person crawled back under the rock from whence they came. And Melanie is now running her dance studio, and she's doing quite well. She's doing beautifully.

So, wow, that is defamation of character, liable, slander liable per se, and slander per se, and I am attorney Shaune Arnold, this is Your Business, Accelerated! I invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. My name in all of those places is S.H.A.U.N. E. dot Arnold. In the meantime, I’m attorney Shaune Arnold, reminding you …once again …to maximize your competence, to get the confidence you need to succeed.

I’ll see you next week right back here on Your Business, Accelerated! Bye–bye, friends!