Parents face defamation trial over fake Facebook page their kid made

Page included graphic sexual content, was allowed to remain up for a year.

by Joe Mullin

Two parents whose teenager set up a fake Facebook page to ridicule a classmate will face a defamation trial, a Georgia appeals court ruled yesterday. Even though they didn't create the page, the parents could be liable because they allowed it to remain up for more than a year, the court said.

In 2011, Alexandria (Alex) Boston, a middle school student in Cobb County, Georgia, shared a homeroom class with Dustin Athearn and Melissa Snodgrass. Athearn and Snodgrass created a fake Facebook page under Boston's name. They posted pictures of her taken using a "fat face" app and wrote posts that suggested she had racist views and was a lesbian, according to a report published today in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"Some of these postings were graphically sexual, racist, or otherwise offensive and some falsely stated that Alex was on a medication regimen for mental health disorders and that she took illegal drugs," wrote the three-judge appeals panel in their opinion (PDF).

The fake account made more than 70 "friends" when Athearn sent out invites to Boston's classmates, friends, and family.

Boston suspected Athearn had made the page; her parents, Amy and Christopher Boston, reported the matter to the school principal. Athearn and Snodgrass admitted to creating the page and were punished with two-day suspensions. The principal notified their parents as well.

"I chose Alex Boston because she followed me around and my friends did not like her and told her to leave me alone," said Athearn in a written statement.

However, the fake Facebook page was not actually removed. It finally came down in April 2012—one month after Alex Boston filed a lawsuit, through her parents, against Athearn, Snodgrass, and their parents. The appeals judges noted:

During the 11 months the unauthorized profile and page could be viewed, the Athearns made no attempt to view the unauthorized page, and they took no action to determine the content of the false, profane, and ethnically offensive information that Dustin was charged with electronically distributing. They did not attempt to learn to whom Dustin had distributed the false and offensive information or whether the distribution was ongoing. They did not tell Dustin to delete the page. Furthermore, they made no attempt to determine whether the false and offensive information Dustin was charged with distributing could be corrected, deleted, or retracted.

Melissa Snodgrass and her father did not respond to the suit and were found in default, the Bostons' lawyer told the Fulton County Daily Report. Athearn and his parents defended the suit and won on summary judgment—but that ruling has now been overturned by the appeals decision. The case has been returned to the lower court for trial.

Nearly three dozen states have passed laws against "cyberbullying," but the liability of parents for their kids' cyberbullying is not resolved. Last year, the Dallas Morning News reported on a case where a Florida child committed suicide after cyberbullying. The lawyer in that case, who also represented George Zimmerman, advocated criminal penalties for the alleged bullies' parents.