Despite its ignominious defeat in the defamation lawsuit against Sunita Viswanath and me, Rasheed Ahmed of the Indian American Muslim Council, John Prabhudoss of the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations, and Prof Audrey Truschke of Rutgers University, the Hindu American Foundation continues to claim that it has been vindicated: They are now trying to put words in the judge’s mouth by incorrectly claiming that the court had determined that Sunita and Audrey had lied about the HAF.
To begin with, the judge ruled that “…the court has reviewed the allegedly defamatory statements attributed to Defendants…and finds that HAF fails to plausibly plead that any statement made by any defendant is verifiably false. Most of the statements are clearly statements of opinion” – that includes my statement to Al Jazeera that the rise of organisations like the HAF “has emboldened Hindu supremacist organizations in India.”
However, the judge also observed in a footnote that only one statement by Sunita and another by Audrey have the potential (“plausibly”) to be proven false — that is, should the lawsuit proceed further. This marks the statements in question as matters of fact, not opinion, a critical distinction in US defamation law.
In what it called the “the silver lining,” the HAF maliciously edited the judge’s legalistic phrase, “plausibly verifiably false” into “verifiably false”, thus changing the meaning of the note to imply that the judge had indeed made a determination that Sunita and Audrey had lied. The judge did no such thing.
This story was originally published in theprint.in . Read the full story here