Comment for Mark Crispin Miller (Draft)
If I understand the wording of the 9 March Appellate Court decision in the case of MILLER v. APPADURAI (2023),
Dismissal of the complaint was... warranted...because the Letter was nonactionable opinion. The Letter, read as a whole and in context, would not lead a reasonable reader to believe that it was conveying facts but rather, that its clear purpose was to advocate for an expedited investigation into plaintiff's purported misconduct,
shouldn't you be suing "Julia Jacks" et al. for defamation, since they are the sources of the "false factual statements" alleging your "purported misconduct" mentioned by your colleagues?
As to your analysis that Judge Goetz used "a far-fetched technicality, and his long delay, suggest that he was only looking for some way to make the whole case go away (as NYU, a highly influential player, surely wanted)," citing "nonactionable opinion" is hardly a "technicality." It is protected under the First Amendment, allowing anyone to not only "slime dissidents," but also to voice negative opinions about the boss, coworkers, government officials, court judges, mothers-in-law, crappy products that work on tv, but not when you get them home, etc. Therefore, one more possible reason why Goetz ruled for dismissal was that he doesn't want to be a referee for workplace spats, especially among notoriously vain, easily offended university faculty members, who are supposed to criticize one another under the rule of academic freedom.
Your colleagues calling you a "problem employee," "incompetent" and "unprofessional," for example, are per se "defamatory" statements, but without factual context, they are nonactionable opinions, a free speech right which allows me to call Budweiser Light worse than horse piss and say that Dylan Mulvaney needs psychiatric support rather than a sports bra. (Although I have never drunk horse piss, am not a psychoanalyst, and haven't the slighest idea or care about the technical aspects of sports bras.)
Now if your colleagues falsely accused you of unfair grading, selling final examination answers, maliciously depriving deserving candidates of scholarships, pissing on university lawns, fondling women students, etc., that's a different situation.1 But the dean has already "exonerated" you of all so-called "wrongdoing" (all of which would have been considered petty and risible in post-Free Speech Movement faculty lounges just 40 or so years ago, at least on the West Coast). So you're now free to slime your colleagues (an academic tradition dating back to the founding of the first institute of higher learning) to your heart's content, thanks to Judge Goetz.
And as to Goetz' decision opening the door to being sued by the US Government for spreading rumors and defaming the government, that's still a Chinese legal move, isn't it? If not, wouldn't the Goetz' of the legal profession be obliged to decide according to the "technical" criteria of whether (1) the words have a precise, readily understood meaning, (2) the context negates the impression that the speaker intended to convey a fact, and (3) the statement can be objectively verified...just like in MILLER v. APPADURAI (2023)?
Compare your situatioan to that of sexologist Dr. Micheal Bailey, who garnered the wrath of “sex is a social construct” transactivists. Bailey’s university received complaints alleging that he had broken rules governing research on human subjects, slept with one of those subjects and taken payment to write referral letters for people seeking sex-reassignment surgery, all sackable offences. An allegation was made to the state regulator that he was practising psychology without a licence. Rumours were circulated that he had abandoned his family, and that he had a drinking problem. Bailey’s family was also targeted. Andrea James, a transwoman working in consumer advocacy in Los Angeles, posted pictures of his children online, with captions saying ‘there are two types of children in the Bailey household’: those ‘who have been sodomised by their father [and those] who have not’, and asking whether his young daughter was ‘a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it’.