Over the course of any sporting event, one of the cameramen will inevitably pan over the crowd and find the hottest girl he can or the person doing the most ridiculous activity he can see.
The April 13th baseball game pitting the Red Sox against the Yankees was no different. A man named Andrew Rector was filmed sleeping during the fourth inning of the game. The cameramen found him and the announcers teased him for about a minute.
Now, he’s suing ESPN, the MLB, the two announcers and the Yankees for $10 million in defamation allegations.
Okay sure, it’s a bit embarrassing to be seen on television sleeping through a baseball game, especially when famous announcers like Dan Shulman and John Kruk tease you about it. I can understand how Rector would be upset. However, if you’re going to go up against a major corporation, you know exactly what you’re doing in claiming they defamed your reputation.
Via: espn
By definition, defamation is “the action of damaging the good reputation of someone,” but in a legal sense, that’s not all there is to it. In order to prove defamation in civil court, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant(s) made false claims of the plaintiff’s immoral, illegal or unethical conduct. The plaintiff must also prove that the assertions made by the defendant(s) were false and meant to harm him/her.
Last time I checked, poking fun at a spectator for doing something outside the realm of spectating did not fall under that umbrella. I don’t think ESPN was trying to purposefully harm a random Yankees fan.
The nine-page manifesto boasts a list of statements supposedly made by the game’s announcers that allegedly prove Rector’s accusation of defamation. One such claim was that “the plaintiff is a confused disgusted and socially bankrupt individual,” which was clearly not made by the two announcers in the span of the telecast.
Rector is blaming ESPN, the MLB, the Yankees, Shulman and Kruk for what people have said about him on the Internet. Sorry, Rector. You can’t actually attribute comments made about you online to two announcers who were just poking a bit of fun at you and expect the law to be on your side. Calling something “defamation” doesn’t make it so.
Via: diehardsport.com
If anyone is guilty of defamation in this instance, it is the people who have since commented on the YouTube video of Rector sleeping. However, if it were common practice to sue everyone who ever made a rude comment about another person online, the whole world would be inundated with lawsuits.
Although it’s true that people should have had the right to sleep at the game without being teased for it, suing a corporation for defamation is going overboard. If someone puts an embarrassing video of you online, I say you just laugh it off and move on with your life instead of making like the Kardashians and exploiting that fifteen-minutes-of-fame for all of eternity.
So, Rector, although I’m truly sorry that you were caught on camera in a moment of sleepiness, I think taking on these entities in a civil lawsuit about defamation is a bold, yet idiotic method of coping.
Featured photo courtesy of: nydailynews.com
