This is the second in a three-part series about the digital world of defamation and involuntary nudity. We started with one of the “offenders,” Hunter Moore, the 25-year-old behind “Is Anyone Up,” a site that posts nude photos of people along with screenshots of their Facebook profile pages. Since I’ve written about women defamed on sex-focused sites many, many, many times, I’m focusing here instead on a male businessman defamed by a disgruntled ex-employee on the consumer website Rip-off Report.  If you Google Paul Syiek, a real estate company CEO in Atlanta, the second hit on his name (at the time of this writing) is “America’s Worst Employers: Paul Syiek – Think Energy Group.” The third hit is a business review of Think Energy Group on a consumer website called Rip-Off Report, in which “Davey Crockett” calls the company a “sweatshop from hell,” describes Syiek as a cheat who swindled him out of thousands of dollars, and says that working for him was like “being held prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.”  Syiek became aware of these September 2010 postings when a new vendor expressed concern about whether he would be paid for his work installing Internet in one of Syiek’s buildings. When Syiek asked why, the vendor told him about what he’d seen online.  Soon thereafter, Syiek says he received a series of calls from companies that offer to clean up your digital footprint. “Once your name is posted on one of these sites, they start calling and offering their services,” says Syiek. Is monitoring defamation sites for victims a new kind of ambulance chasing?  Syiek instead sought the services of law firm Bryan Cave to file a legal complaint and get a subpoena issued to Ripoff Report to find out who Davey Crockett really was. Ripoff Report complied, and released the poster’s IP information. It turned out to be a man who had worked for Syiek for five months in the 1990s. Syiek, who has had over 7,000 employees over the years (“and not a single Department of Labor complaint”) remembers the man, with whom he was friendly. “He’s a little off kilter,” says Syiek, who says the man has also made a series of defamatory posts about his ex-wife, with whom he divorced 30 years ago.  Syiek amended his complaint with the man’s real name, Kevin McGreevy, won a defamation suit against him in March, and was awarded $174,863 in damages plus attorney fees (approximately $20K). (Whether he’ll actually be able to get that money is another matter. McGreevy isn’t wealthy and it’s unlikely he has “defamation insurance.” “We’re working on collection,” says Syiek’s lawyer.)  Syiek got vindication in court but not online. Despite the legal judgment, the defamatory post remains up on Ripoff Report. “Ripoff Report is one of those companies that has really pushed Section 230 [the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for the things their users post],” says Luke Lantta, Syiek’s lawyer. “They have a firm policy of not taking down a post even in light of a judgment.”  Late last year, a federal court upheld Ripoff Report’s legal right to do so, in another case of defamation.  Ripoff Report advised Syiek to consider their “Corporate Advocacy Program” — which some might call thinly-veiled extortion. Companies that wind up on Ripoff Report pages can pay to have poor reviews drowned out with positive reviews, and have any evidence of vindication highly placed. Ripoff Report also promises to get its reviews removed from a company’s top Google search results, but judging from their example of doing that for Lucas Car Care, it’s not very effective. Ripoff Report remains the company’s second Google hit, though “false statements have been redacted” by a Ripoff arbitrator and the negative reviews are now outweighed by a deluge of overly enthusiastic ones that seem too positive to be believed.  “I could hire a company to fix this, but that would be another $20,000 or $30,000. You have to decide when to stop spending money,” says Syiek.  Syiek has since sold Think Energy Group and started a new business called Global Energies, but the search results for his name continue to be a problem.  “You work your whole life to have a clean record and then you have someone come along and mess that up. You’re assumed guilty on the Internet if something is written about you,” says Syiek, who points out sites like Ripoff Report are especially devasting for small businesses. “If you’re a small company or firm and you get a bad review there, it can ruin your livelihood.”
Defamatory negative reviews can ruin a small business, but they're good business for start-ups designed to clean up dirty Google footprints, as well as the sites that host the reviews.