A West Australian man has successfully sued his estranged wife for defamation over a Facebook post that suggested she was the victim of domestic violence, after a Perth court found she could not prove the statement was true.
Bunbury teacher Miro Dabrowski was awarded $12,500 in damages at the West Australian district court in December by Justice Michael Bowden.
The offending post, which was posted on his estranged wife Robyn Greeuw’s public Facebook profile in December 2012, read: “Separated from Miro Dabrowski after 18 years of suffering domestic violence and abuse. Now fighting the system to keep my children safe.”
Greeuw removed the post from her page in February 2013, after she received a letter from Dabrowski’s lawyer.
But in his decision, Bowden writes that Greewu told the court she had written part of that statement into Facebook but not published it, and suggested her computer had been hacked to create the screenshot of the post that was used in the trial.
She also argued that the statement was not defamatory or, if it was, that it was covered under the justification defence which allows the publication of defamatory material if it can be proved to be “substantially true”.
Greewu, who represented herself, described a long history of emotional and occasionally physical abuse to the court, which she said began soon after the pair married in 1992. The relationship ended on 2 March 2012, when police served Dabrowski with an interim violence restraining order from Greewu at their house. Dabrowski denied he was ever abusive.
In his decision, Bowden said some of Dabrowski’s comments about the nature of the relationship were “incredulous”. But he said Greewu’s “implausible” claims about how the Facebook post came to be undermined her credibility, and meant he could not find she had been the victim of domestic violence and abuse on her word alone… see more
source: Guardian UK
Tags: Facebook Defamation, technology
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