Great article from Los Angeles Magazine which profiles Defamer - one of my favorite blogs.
This particular section stuck out at me [my own emphasis added near the end]:
The one figure who will go on the record with complaints about the Defamer is the entertainment lawyer Bert Fields. “My problem with the Defamer is that it has no standards,” says Fields. “It feels that it can say anything about anyone. Humor is one thing—nobody minds a spoof—but these people go substantially beyond humor. He can do enormous personal damage to people.”
Fields, whose clients include Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Tom Cruise, has been jousting with the Defamer since shortly after it posted its photomontage of Cruise’s bizarre performance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The lawyer took his first run at the site in early August when it published a synopsis of a Radar magazine article on Cruise’s affiliation with Scientology that quoted a former church member who alleged the actor had doubts about the religion. “Your story about Mr. Cruise is false and defamatory,” Fields wrote the Defamer. “Please correct this misrepresentation as quickly as possible.” The lawyer took aim again several weeks later after the site ran two photographs purporting to show a nine-year-old Cruise dressed up as Dorothy for a grade-school production of The Wizard of Oz. “The picture of the child dressed as a dancer is not Mr. Cruise,” declared Fields in an e-mail. “It’s his sister, Cass. At nine, he once put on a costume in the picture for a Halloween party. He did not go around dressed as a girl as your report suggests. I must ask that you cease any publication of those photographs and retract the suggestion that he dressed regularly as a girl.”
It didn’t take long for Fields to hear back from the Defamer. The site responded to the lawyer’s initial letter by reprinting it in whole, then proclaiming, “There you have it, straight from Team Cruise: The actor’s faith in L. Ron Hubbard was, is, and forever after shall be unshakable.” The second complaint prompted an even more arch retort. Beneath the headline “Defamer Clarification: Tom Cruise Only Dressed as Dorothy Once,” the site asserted, “Even though we never suggested an ongoing predilection for women’s clothing on the part of Mr. Cruise, we retract, we retract, we retract.”
For Fields, the Defamer’s mocking replies were beside the point. “I always contest,” says the lawyer. “If bloggers are entitled to the protection of the newspaper statute—and I don’t think they are—I’m required to ask for a retraction. The law demands that.” Fields was laying the foundation for a libel action, should that be the course Cruise wants to pursue.As Lisanti sees it, Fields’s decision to mix it up with the Defamer proves that the site is succeeding in its mission. “Isn’t it the height of absurdity that Tom Cruise’s lawyer writes and says he only wore the dress one time?” he asks. “These people take themselves so seriously..."
Indeed! It must suck to be Bert Fields.
[Be sure to read the whole article].