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Comment by pliftkl | Hacker News Reader

A better headline might read "I wrote a review on Yelp in which I accused a doctor of committing insurance fraud on other patients that I had no actual knowledge of, and it made my life a nightmare".

Courts have established that you can write negative reviews and that they fall well within rights to freedom of speech. She isn't being sued for giving the guy a one-star review and saying "This place sucks". There's one sentence she wrote that has cost her $20k:

"I suspect that this doctor gives unnecessary procedure to a lot of people and then charges the insurance sky high prices and no one knows the difference."

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Well, if it happens to one patient, how likely is it that this is common practice?

Also, she started the sentence with "I suspect", which is very different from a plain accusation.

You cant veil an accusation under a single adjective, come on..

It might happen to many others, but her accusation is baseless and she is responsible for it. Suing for libel is an appropriate right.

How is it baseless?

She has no evidence whatsoever that this happened to someone else.

She has absolute evidence that she in fact suspects this.

It also seems like this is a go-to tactic of hers. If you check here:

https://www.yellowpages.com/user/503859115/reviews

2014 review by one "Michelle L" of New York, NY. Starts with the exact same byline: "Very poor and crooked business practice.". Completely different practice. One with great reviews, for the most part.

Wow how did you find that?

You can google for the exact phrase, "Very poor and crooked business practice", which is attributed to her review of the doctor.

If it's that simple, how do we know that she, rather than e.g. someone at the gynecologist's office, wrote this review?

Because it's not a word-for-word reposting. The details are different between the two. And she plastered it on multiple sites, similar to the claim regarding Dr Yoon's review.

I'm not saying it was or wasn't the doctor posting it. Just pointing out that if it was her who posted the dental review, she seems to have a similar story happen to her frequently. Which is suspect.

Yes that makes sense. It's probably not important for us to know "the truth" at this time. This seems like the sort of thing that our courts can sort out.

Because it's unlikely someone in the gynecologist's office traveled back in time to 2014 to when the Yellowpages.com review is stated as being written?

Hold on, you cut the title short.

It'd end with a comma, then "and they posted my entire medical record, bills, insurance info, home address, etc"

Where did they post them though? They didn't post them to Yelp, you can't do that. They didn't post them on their own website. Where would they have posted them?

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