A $6 million defamation lawsuit against a Guelph woman regarding some of their social media posts can move ahead, an appeals court has ruled.
The suit was dismissed last year under anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) legislation. In a decision released on Thursday, a panel of three appeals judges determined that shouldn’t have happened.
“The question is not whether the appellant consented to a risk of being defamed by communicating on Twitter or any other medium but, instead, whether the appellant can establish that he should be permitted to continue his defamation actions,” the decision states.
“There were grounds to believe that the defamation actions have substantial merit.”
The lawsuit from Probhash Mondal and his company, Guelph Medical Imaging (GMI), is seeking $5 million in general damages and $1 million in punitive damages, aggravated and exemplary damages against Stephanie Marie Evans-Bitten after tweeted statements Modal believes were defamatory and libellous.
Initially, Kathryn Evans-Bitten, the defendant’s wife, was also named in the lawsuit, but the allegations against them were dismissed last year – something the appeals court upheld.
The central tweet in question, from June of 2021, came from Stephanie Evans-Bitten’s @ScurvyCompanion Twitter account and said: “This #PrideMonth2021, I want to remind #Guelph leaders that gay residents in the city are being forced to seek healthcare diagnostics in other cities because Guelph Medical Imaging is owned and lead by a man who thinks and tweets this stuff:”
The tweet was deleted a few days after it was posted. In 2021, they posted, “the CEO of GMI also runs 'UBIMICO' and likes to post homophobic content like this."
Attached to that tweet were copies of three of Mondal’s own tweets. In the first, Mondal criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for waving a rainbow flag during a Pride parade. In that tweet, Mondal wrote, “Please do not defile our flag.”
A second tweet listed in the court documents is a tweet from Mondal showing he was responding to news that then-Toronto Mayor John Tory had attended a drag show in the Church-Wellesley Village. Mondal criticized Tory by saying, “Where’s the tranny, @JohnTory’s got some benjamins for your thong!!!”
The third copied tweet is a photo of Mondal standing with two Conservative Party of Ontario politicians – Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Education Stephen Lecce. In the tweet Mondal was critical of the province’s 2015 sexual health education curriculum, which included LGBTQ topics, and which the Ford government had repealed.
In last year’s court decision to dismiss the lawsuit, Justice Edward Morgan wrote, “He got it back as good as he gave it, and got wet in the process,” referring to Mondal.
“These remarks read almost as an assertion of volenti non fit injuria – as though those who choose to communicate on Twitter know what they are getting into and so cannot complain about the way in which they are treated,” the appeal judges wrote. “In effect, they consent to the risk of being defamed.
“This is not so.”
No date has been set for the lawsuit to go ahead.
Included in this week’s ruling, the court upheld the dismissal of a related lawsuit against Ross Kirkconnell and Michelle Smith, the executive director and his assistant of the Guelph Family Health Team, regarding emails they sent to doctors and board members that shared the tweets in question.
