A man stands accused of cyberstalking a prominent female leader within their movement, obsessively tweeting at her and criticizing her on his blog. She takes him to task for cyberstalking, harassment, and causing her emotional harm, and he defends himself by claiming that she is a public figure and as such should expect to weather a certain amount of criticism. What should be the outcome in such a case?
Ok, so you may be thinking of Justin Vacula right now (and perhaps one or two of his more popular interlocutors) but I’m not talking about them here. I’m actually talking about the criminal case against William Lawrence Cassidy for cyberstalking Buddhist leader Alyce Zeoli. You can read a brief summary of the case on CNN, or you may read the entire case. The upshot is that Cassidy (who by all accounts was indeed hatefully obsessed with Zeoli) moved to dismiss on grounds of free speech, and the District Court granted his motion because “in public debate our own citizens must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide ‘adequate breathing space’ to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.” The court also noted that Zeoli was a public figure and therefore a public critique (however crudely expressed) of the quality of her spiritual leadership was the sort of behavior that should be considered to fall under the rubric of First Amendment protection.
There are those who have claimed the law of defamation has nothing to do with the law of cyberstalking, but in truth, they are both connected to the larger body of American constitutional jurisprudence in precisely the same way — by the First Amendment. In both kinds of cases, more lenience will be afforded a defendant who can rightly claim to have been exercising free speech, especially core political speech, by criticizing a public figure. It seems to me this is precisely as it should be.
