Entrepreneurs and corporate officers can be victims of libel and slander, collectively known as defamation. A person is defamed if someone makes a statement about them that would cause someone else hearing or reading it to think worse of them.
If defamatory statements are published about you as an individual, your board, your company or your brand, you need to act quickly and decisively.
Contacting lawyers at a media organisation that is threatening to publish defamatory allegations and pointing out errors will usually buy time and may result in the story being amended or dropped.
The key to confronting such threats is to ensure those with appropriate authority and expertise are made aware of them in time to act.
Deciding an appropriate response requires legal skill and experience: in reality most threats can be ignored and it does more harm than good to counter them. Arousing additional interest in information previously known only to a few is counter-productive.
Judging whether to act requires a review of the credibility of the maker of the allegations, and the importance of the audience that the initial allegation enjoys. Will it be picked up sufficiently online to pose a threat or reach the mainstream media? What kind of information is it, and what is the appetite for it?
One risk of failing to take appropriate action is that the story may be repeated in the future.
Unless the file carries a correction or is marked to indicate a legal objection, the story could be repeated every time the executive, company, brand or product is in the news – and this could delay due diligence in a business transaction.