Ezra Backdates

The amazing Buckets has now confirmed Ezra Levant's back-dating of a post that may well prove important to the defamation case being brought against him by CHRC lawyer Giacomo Vigna. Put crudely, Vigna has sued Levant for suggesting that he (Vigna) faked an illness to get out of a CHRT (Canadian Human Rights Tribunal) hearing; in his "Correction" , Levant admits that Vigna was indeed able to secure a doctor's note for whatever ailed him, AND that he turned said note over to the tribunal. All of which Levant had asserted previously was NOT THE CASE.

In the comments to a previous post, lawyer Ted Betts speculated as to why Levant's correction might have been issued in the first place:

By back-dating a post, it does not appear in the blog aggregator, exposing it to the eyes of so many more people. Try it with Liblogs or Progressive Bloggers.

A defamation claim is about harm to one's reputation because of the publication of falsehoods. In a defamation suit, therefore an apology is important for two reasons.

First, if you lose, you can claim the penalty should be less since the harm caused to the plaintiff's reputation was eliminated or at least lessened by a retraction or apology in the same publication. i.e. anyone who saw the first falsehood would have seen the retraction and therefore the reputation was unharmed.

Second - and this is fairly new law - it is an important defence to show that, even if the facts you relayed were false, you were not acting maliciously but based on what you thought was true and the moment you found out your information was incorrect, you apologized or retracted. In fact, the failure to apologize, clarify or retract a known falsehood when given the chance can be taken against you.

Which makes the back-dating even more interesting since, by back-dating it and minimizing the number of people who see it, it defeats the purpose of publishing it in the first place.

And this comes out a day before the case is due to start! Damn that's raw!