I am not a lawyer. If I use as examples only what people I have met in person have told me (i.e. not anything I have read online, because yes that is a sample selected for being outrageous), I know three people who were targets of defamation lawsuits, and zero people who used one. I know more people who were, in my opinion quite realistically threatened by a possibility of such lawsuit, and as a result decided to be quiet about some bad activities that definitely should have been discussed publicly. I am not even counting myself in that set, and I know about the same activities that I do not discuss, no one even needed to threaten me directly, it is enough to know that other people in analogical situation were threatened for me to connect the dots. I know zero people who considered or threatened using a defamation lawsuit.
Each of us can have an unrepresentative sample, given our different professions and people we hang out with. So I am not saying that my experience is more representative than yours. Just adding a different data point.
Based on my experience, using this kind of threat is an evidence of being a villain, because I have only seen obvious villains use this weapon, either as a threat or as actual lawsuit. Now I realize my experience may not be typical, but… it still seems more likely than the opposite.
On reflection, this is probably less about good and evil, and more about rich and poor. Rich people use legal attacks; rich people successfully deflect legal attacks. Poor (and average) people don’t use them, and can’t deflect them. I simply do not hang out with sufficiently rich people.
I am not a lawyer. If I use as examples only what people I have met in person have told me (i.e. not anything I have read online, because yes that is a sample selected for being outrageous), I know three people who were targets of defamation lawsuits, and zero people who used one. I know more people who were, in my opinion quite realistically threatened by a possibility of such lawsuit, and as a result decided to be quiet about some bad activities that definitely should have been discussed publicly. I am not even counting myself in that set, and I know about the same activities that I do not discuss, no one even needed to threaten me directly, it is enough to know that other people in analogical situation were threatened for me to connect the dots. I know zero people who considered or threatened using a defamation lawsuit.
Each of us can have an unrepresentative sample, given our different professions and people we hang out with. So I am not saying that my experience is more representative than yours. Just adding a different data point.
Based on my experience, using this kind of threat is an evidence of being a villain, because I have only seen obvious villains use this weapon, either as a threat or as actual lawsuit. Now I realize my experience may not be typical, but… it still seems more likely than the opposite.
On reflection, this is probably less about good and evil, and more about rich and poor. Rich people use legal attacks; rich people successfully deflect legal attacks. Poor (and average) people don’t use them, and can’t deflect them. I simply do not hang out with sufficiently rich people.