My ex-wife told my 19-year-old daughter that I threatened my ex's life, does this constitute slander?
Question Details:
During a child support hearing my ex-wife, her attorney and I (I was pro se) were required to meet with a court mediator. At that meeting my ex-wife told the mediator that I had threatened her life and that she had heard this from a "reliable source". I was told via answers here that because it happened in a court setting it was "privileged" and thereby not slander. However, I have since learned that she made the same claim to my 19yo daughter outside of court. Is this actionable?
Under the facts as you have stated them here, I think a claim for slander would propertly lie. However, these cases are very hard to prove and they often do not result in significant damages.
Quite possibly. The privilege doesn't attach to the statement, it only attaches to the judicial proceeding in which it's made. If it's repeated outside the courtroom, that's a new "publication" that isn't privileged.
The next legal issue to consider is probably whether this statement is slander "per se," or whether it needs to be proved to be damaging to your reputation by context (for example, calling someone "clumsy" probably isn't slander if it's directed to a lawyer -- but a surgeon could probably recover for that). The exact wording matters, although I'd lean toward "per se" here. I doubt this would be considered only an opinion, but if so, it's not actionable.
