For two years, a Mississippi blogger conducted a vitriolic “nightmare” campaign against two gay Nova Scotia men who operate a wilderness getaway near Kemptville in the southwest end of the province.

Doug K. Handshoe, a certified public accountant and inveterate blogger, has never met the Trout Point Lodge owners Charles Leary and Vaughan Perret or stayed at their getaway. Yet he consistently made graphic homophobic comments on his website, accused the two owners of all kinds of criminal acts and disparaged the small resort in the Tobeatic Wilderness reserve.

“It’s been a nightmare, I have to tell you,” an emotional Perret told the Toronto Star Thursday.

Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Suzanne Hood agreed and this week awarded Leary and Perret $425,000 in damages — reported to be the largest defamation damage award in Nova Scotia history — and issued a permanent injunction against Handshoe.

Besides Leary, 45, and Perret, 52, there is third partner in the 12-unit lodge, Daniel Abel of New Orleans. All three are Americans.

Handshoe, who considers himself a bit of forensic auditor, told the Star in an interview he has no intentions of paying and will go to the U.S. court to have the Canadian ruling struck down on the basis that it is an affront to his constitutional rights of freedom of speech.

“I won’t be gagged,” he said. “In the U.S. . . . we are allowed to call people bad names if we want.”

Perret and Leary were collateral damage of alleged political corruption that has its roots in Louisiana, where former Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard and other parish officials are under indictment in a federal probe of alleged corruption.

It turns out that Broussard owned two cottages on the same road as Trout Point Lodge, but New Orleans’ The Times-Picayune mistakenly reported that Broussard owned Trout Point Lodge. The award-winning paper later apologized for the error in the 2010 story. That’s where Handshoe came into the picture.

He refused to believe the correction and insisted for more than two years that Perret and Leary were part of the conspiracy, leaning heavily on the fact the two once managed Broussard’s cottages and that Broussard and the two men were members of the Billy’s Hill Trail Society.

“So I started investigating and the more I dug the more I found,” Handshoe said.

“We don’t know him, we’ve never seen him, we’ve never met him. We have no idea who he is other than he’s this blogger in Mississippi . . . other than he turned his sights on us,” Perret said. “Partially, it’s homophobia. If you look at the blog you will see constant references really homophobic language, hateful language.”

Mojzu wrote:Things like defamation and libel laws are just nefarious ways of subverting freedom of speech. What the blogger was doing was awful and reprehensible, but nothing that was (or should be) illegal to my mind, unless we want to make lying and posting stupid things online against the law.

Mojzu wrote:In fact the most common response to these situations is increased awareness and support of the people/business that the blogger is trying to defame, I wouldn't be surprised if the lodge owners get a ton of new business over this.

Mojzu wrote:We should regulate news companies and other businesses so that they are prohibited from maliciously misleading the public through any medium. But we shouldn't monitor and regulate what every individual has to say and how factual or appropriate they are, as you would pretty much kill the internet (at least the legal part of it) overnight.

And if the malicious lies spread by this blogger result in a homophobe deciding to firebomb their business, what then? Just shrug your shoulders and say "tough, that's the price of free speech"?

Calilasseia wrote:I don't think you'll find much support here, for the idea that people who fabricate malicious lies for the express aim of inflicting material harm upon the victims, should be allowed to do so in a consequence-free manner.

And if the malicious lies spread by this blogger result in a homophobe deciding to firebomb their business, what then? Just shrug your shoulders and say "tough, that's the price of free speech"?

No one is suggesting this for a moment - you're erecting a manifest red herring here. The facts of the case, are that the individual in question mounted a campaign of hate against his victims, accusing them falsely of complicity in criminal offences (despite the fact that Canadian law enforcement never saw any reason to investigate them), and in addition disseminated some nasty instances of hate speech, of the sort that would have led to action far sooner had he uttered such sentiments against, say, African-Americans. Would you be so happy to support this blogger, if he had, for example, posted about two African-Americans, referring to them as "welfare parasite niggers"?

Doug K. Handshoe, a certified public accountant and inveterate blogger

The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the extremely high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and the difficulty in proving essentially what is inside a person's head, such cases—when they involve public figures—rarely prevail.