By now, anyone who cares (and many who don’t) has heard about the verdict in the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. After six weeks of testimony and reams of evidence including photographs, texts, and videos documenting the former spouses’ poisonous interactions, the jury awarded Depp ten million dollars in compensatory damages and five million in punitive damages. (Conversely, Heard was awarded two million in damages for comments made by one of Depp’s lawyers.) The statements that Heard was held to be liable for included a reference to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse” in an op-ed published in the Washington Post, in 2018—which, as it turned out, was drafted, at least initially, by the A.C.L.U. Moreover, Heard and an A.C.L.U. representative said during the trial that the headline of the piece, as is common, was written by a member of the editorial staff of the Post, and not Heard herself. Nevertheless, whether or not she wrote any of the actual words, Heard was liable because she “made or published” them (including by tweeting a link to the piece), and because the jury found they were untrue.
Noticeably absent from the case, however, was the actual publisher that printed and distributed the statements—the Washington Post. Generally, conventional publishers are responsible for the words they publish, even if someone else writes them or if they are contained in a quote. (Internet companies have an exemption from this general...
On May 10, a Muslim man called Arif Khan was assaulted inside a hotel in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal. Khan was with a Hindu woman at the hotel when men reportedly linked to the Bajrang Dal entered the ...