Can a bad Yelp review be slander?

Another interesting case in the annals of free speech: what should be done when a person posts a bad review of your business -- and it includes false accusations of your employees committing crimes?

A woman in Northern Virginia posted a one-star review on Yelp of a local contracting firm, accusing its workers not only of shoddy workmanship, but of theft of her jewelry. However, a subsequent police investigation cleared the contractor, who is now suing her for $750,000 in defamation damages, claiming that her review's accusations are severely hurting his business.

What he didn't reckon with was the outcry that has resulted: his number of one-star reviews has now gone up, as people weigh in with such comments as this:

"I have never used this company nor would I given that they are suing a customer over a review."

I understand that the reaction seems severe. But how would this commenter like being wrongly accused of theft on the Internet?

I suspect the right approach here would have been not to sue the irate customer, but for the contractor to approach Yelp directly, once the police had cleared his name, and privately request that they remove the offending comment -- and perhaps also post a kind of disclaimer to explain what happened. (Whether it would ultimately hurt or help him in the long run to have a permanent record of the accusation out there -- even if it exonerates him -- is an open question.)

You could argue that Yelp isn't the only review site out there, and that a suit against the defamer herself is necessary to restrain her from continuing to broadcast her message. But the best policy may nonetheless be to quietly get those posts removed. People aren't going to think carefully when they hear the headline of "Business sues woman who gave them one-star review" -- the business is going to come off as the villain, and so the suit only increases the damage, rather than repairing it.

Reference Links:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/2012/12/04/1cdfa582-3978-11e2-a263-f0ebffed2f15_story.html

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/07/yelp-reviewer-gets-slapped-with-750k-lawsuit-and-takedown-order/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/7/3740932/jane-perez-yelp-defamation-lawsuit

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/berkeley-study-half-star-change-in-yelp-rating-can-make-or-break-a-restaurant/