I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
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Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Longtime Ingham County Commissioner and Michigan political consultant Mark Grebner has filed a defamation lawsuit in Ingham County Circuit Court against three men for allegedly editing false and defamatory information into his biographical entry on Wikipedia.
The three defendants are Dennis Lennox, a Central Michigan University student who received a great deal of attention over the last few years for a string of politically-charged incidents on that campus and was elected Cheboygan County drain commissioner last year; Bradley Dennis, a member of the Michigan State University College Republicans who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Grebner for the Ingham County Commission last fall; and MSU sophomore Anthony Giammarinaro.
The three are accused of editing Grebner’s Wikipedia entry to include information that Grebner, a Democrat, argues is false and libelous. But the nature of the specific edits varies widely. Dennis Lennox is accused of accessing Grebner’s Wikipedia entry on Aug. 5, 2008, and inserting the following into the entry:
Mark Grebner (born 1952) is a homosexual American politician and political consultant from the state of Michigan.
Bradley Dennis is accused of inserting a more politically relevant but, according to Grebner, false statement on Oct. 24, 2008:
Going into the 2008 fiscal year, the Ingham County Board of Commissioners amassed a county deficit of more than 4 million dollars. In response to the deficit, Mark Grebner commented that as a strategy to the deficit, he would like to continue to raise taxes rather then reform government. He proceeded to introduce a proposal to the 2008 ballot that proposed increasing taxes by as much as 4.4 million dollars. The controversy started when Grebner help to name the Proposal a ‘tax limitation’. Many have argued that this was a strategy by the Board to ‘trick’ the voters into a tax increase that they would otherwise never support.
Anthony Giammarinaro faces the most serious charge of all for allegedly inserting this statement into Grebner’s Wiki entry on Oct. 25, 2008:
In 1997, Grebner was convicted on three counts of sexually abusing children. His comment ‘Ok-I’m weird. Vote for me anyway.’
Giammarinaro is also accused of inserting a picture of Osama bin Laden into the entry with the caption “One of Grebner’s biggest supporters in the 2004 election.”
In all three instances, Grebner’s suit seeks compensation from the defendants in “whatever amount in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000.00) that the court and/or a jury deems fair and reasonable.”
It appears that the strongest of the accusations is against Giammarinaro. American libel law requires that the defendant issue a statement they knew, or should have known, was false with reckless disregard of the truth and with the intent to defame the target.
In the case of Lennox, at least one appeals court in the United States has ruled that calling someone a homosexual is not a defamatory statement. But Bruce Sanford, a legal scholar who literally wrote the book on this subject — a law school textbook called “Libel and Privacy” — said that other courts might well view that issue differently.
Speaking of the aforementioned case Sanford told Michigan Messenger: “That could be true in Massachusetts but not be true in another state. There’s always been a difference in state laws dealing with such things. Even if it’s filed in federal court, they have to look to the common law of the state and to state court law to see whether it’s actionable or not. Another court might say that it might reasonably be capable of a defamatory statement and we’ll let a jury decide. The context matters greatly.
But the alleged insertion by Giammarinaro, claiming that Grebner had been convicted of child molestation in 1997, clearly falls under the definition of libel. “That’s either an accurate statement or not,” Sanford said. “If it’s inaccurate, it’s certainly capable of a defamatory meaning so it easily falls within libel law.”
Sanford was less convinced by the accusation against Giammarinaro concerning the picture of Osama bin Laden. “I think people would see that as a satire or a tasteless joke,” said Sanford. “I’m not sure that any kind of parody, sarcasm, any kind of humor, as long as it’s recognized as humor, is actionable. Here it’s so ridiculous that I don’t think it could be mistaken for a factual statement. Osama bin Laden has not, after all, been supporting particular American politicians.”
The key will be proving that these statements came from these particular individuals. The defendants were identified by IP addresses used to edit Grebner’s Wikipedia entry, which is logged by the website. In the case of Lennox, Grebner narrowed down the IP address to about 40 users in the small town in which he lives and concluded that Lennox was the only one in that small group with any incentive to attack him.
In the cases of Dennis and Giammarinaro, the evidence is considerably more clear. Both are MSU students and both IP addresses from which those edits were made trace to South Case Hall, where they both lived during the school year. Grebner had to issue a subpoena to MSU to get the university to release the identity of the person using the IP address at that time and they positively identified Dennis and Giammarinaro.
Michigan Messenger spoke with Jason Bryans, a former MSU computer tech consultant, who explained that when each MSU student registers to access the university’s network, their account is matched up with a unique code called a MAC address that is different for each computer — and even different for each computer’s particularly way of accessing the network as the MAC address for a given computer’s wireless networking apparatus is different than the MAC address for that computer’s ethernet connector.
The IP address is not static for each user, but the network logs which IP address is assigned to which user’s computer at any given time. Because the IP address and time of access were logged by Wikipedia, that information was then cross checked against the network logs and it was determined by the university that the computers using those particular IP addresses at those particular times belonged to Dennis and Giammarinaro.
The suit was filed on May 14 but the defendants are just now being served with the papers. All three defendants were contacted for this story. Dennis Lennox replied that since he did not have a copy of the complaint he could not comment at this time, but he did say that he did not know the other two defendants in the case. Anthony Giammarinaro replied via his Facebook account and simply said, “No comment.” Bradley Dennis did not reply to inquiries by press time.
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