The post touches on this:
In determining whether the audience is likely to interpret a statement as one of fact or one of opinion or hyperbole, courts consider a viewpoint of an audience familiar with the speaker, the forum, and the circumstances.
The interesting thing here --- and this is useful for HN, which sometimes has very weird ideas of what constitutes defamation --- is that opinions can't be defamatory. You need to be able to trace a defamation claim back to a damaging revelation of a false fact. Here, the root of the damaging claim is a Tarot reading, which is what makes this case spicy.
Is that an opinion (her interpretation of what the card means) or a lie (because it's highly unlikely there's any system in which that card could possibly lead to that interpretation)?
Is that defamation?
If you believe in God, you could reasonably believe that God came down and showed me the list.
If you don't believe, then this is obviously made up.
My personal opinion is that a 'fact' depends upon what the audience and/or speaker believes. So a tarot reading on a tarot reading channel could be construed as a fact. As could trump stating at a trump rally that the election was stolen.
But that would be irrelevant against the defense "I have a superior understanding of how to read the messages in the cards than other people do". Which seems like a pretty likely defense.
If you can prosecute "the cards told me X is the murderer", you can also prosecute "God told me X is the murderer"; they are identical claims.
Can't you prosecute the latter though? Its not like freedom of religion is a get out of jail free card. Like you can't murder someone and then say $deity made me do it.
No, you can't; it might be true.
Well. I would imagine something like that actually happened in the days of the early colonies: Bob kills Alice, claims she was a witch and the God revealed it to him, the juries agree that Alice was actually a pretty shifty woman, and the Bob goes away with a fine for unlicensed witch hunting^W^W^W vigilantism.
Didn't read the article, but any hint of an "it is merely entertainment, not to be believed" element of defense?
https://www.quora.com/Did-Fox-News-say-that-No-one-should-be...
To be fair I'd trust a Tarot reader more than I'd trust any news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch.
There is no general overarching rule that applies a reasonable person standard to all areas of law.
That [this person/these people] reasonably understood that the statement(s) [was/were] about [name of plaintiff]
And
“If [a] defamatory meaning would appear only to readers who might be able to recognize it through some knowledge of specific facts and/or circumstances, not discernible from the face of the publication, and which are not matters of common knowledge rationally attributable to all reasonable persons, then the libel cannot be libel per se but will be libel per quod.” (Palm Springs Tennis Club, supra, 73 Cal.App.4th at p. 5, internal citation omitted.)
So imagine I combine some niche industry terms to call you something nasty - say, "init forker" - and make it a statement of fact, though one that's hard to discern even for insiders, much less for the general audience. But it so happens that you're an influencer on the side. You make an angry Tiktok video whining about me. Then someone in your audience makes a YouTube commentary about it. Then someone else makes a counter-commentary. Fast forward one week, half the population in the country knows what "init forker" means.
Would this give you grounds for an effective libel suit? Even if it only became "matters of common knowledge rationally attributable to all reasonable persons" after the fact, thanks to third parties making the story viral on the Internet?
And it still needs to meet all the other requirements, the statement needs to be provably false. Not just an opinion, not a substantially true statement, that the statements were made(in writing) to someone other than who they were about, there were actual damages and they damages were substantially caused by the libelous writing. Showing actual damages in a defamation case is hard
'In determining whether the audience is likely to interpret a statement as one of fact or one of opinion or hyperbole, courts consider a viewpoint of an audience familiar with the speaker, the forum, and the circumstances. Scofield asserts that Guillard is known for “solving” mysteries based on tarot and “readings.” Doesn’t that mean that an audience familiar with her is more likely to interpret anything she says as premised on occult readings, and not on some undisclosed actual evidence?'
With regard to the last sentence, I would argue that the target audience is likely to see no difference here, and what's more, regard the statements as being based on disclosed actual evidence.
Are you referring to whether a reasonable listener would believe the defamatory claims? Or whether the person doing the defaming could reasonably be expected to know better than to believe what they're saying?
Normally, we think of situations where the defamer is a crazy person and no reasonable listener would believe them. But the distinction seems pertinent to the potential prosecution against Trump based on the Jan 6th committee hearings, because in that case the normal "reasonable person" standard would be inverted. A reasonable listener could easily believe that the President of the United States was describing reality when he claimed he knew the election was stolen and that the Vice President could legally overturn the results. His defense may well rest on whether he himself could have reasonably believed that what he was saying was true.