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muhly22222 -> RE: What would happen to your life if you were outed? (2/14/2013 1:33:26 PM)
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ORIGINAL: SWDesertDom
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ORIGINAL: Bittersweetcoco
I honestly thought I was safe because I was not important. I was not well known, I had no clout, and I had no important or well connected friends or family members. I worked at a job that required a high school education and paid just over minimum wage. My annual income has never exceeded the 20,000 range. I. was. a. nobody. So I figured who the hell would even care about what "nobody" was doing? In fact that was the only relief I got from the story in the paper. The vast majority of mainstream people did not know who the fuck they were talking about. I think the front page thing was partially done as a message to the local D/s community. Nothing scares a group more than completely destroying one of its members in plain site.
For the record (I'm not a lawyer, this is not to be construed as official legal advice), depending on the jurisdiction you live in, you may have a valid tort (legal claim of damages) against the person who "outed" you and the publication that "outed" you. In general, under libel law, the truth is a defense against slander, however this does not apply if you are not a "public" figure. In general it is illegal to publicly disclose private facts about a person (not applicable if you are, say, some sort of celebrity or politician). You may want to contact a lawyer if this happened recently.
I am a lawyer, although I'm not offering legal advice. Defamation laws wouldn't apply here, since both the person and the publication seem to have told the truth about the OP's involvement with BDSM. However, there could be valid tort claims for an invasion of privacy and publication of private information. Your private sex life (since you were not a public figure...although they may try to claim you were if you worked for some government agency) is nobody's business, and there is no public interest in it.
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I contacted several lawyers in my area and every lawyer listed on KAP. No one would touch it. The one or two that said that they would "consider it" also said they would need thousands of dollars for retainer. (Which said to me they did not want to handle it anyway) I cannot prove the person who outed me did it since my employer and the papers were more than happy to protect him; but I am certain of who it was.
If you were in Ohio, I'd take your case (although the statute of limitations may apply, since you didn't say when it was). My retainer is a couple of thousand dollars, too, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in taking your case. The way retainers work in my state (and, I believe, a number of other states) is that you give the attorney the retainer upfront, whatever it is. He then puts it into his trust account, and withdraws the money as he earns it. If, at the end of the case, any money is left in the trust account, that is to be refunded to you. We just do it that way to ensure that we get paid for our work; believe it or not, a lot of clients won't pay if the case doesn't go the way they want it to.
One factor that may have been involved in your retainer being so high is that it's often a long and difficult battle to sue newspapers. They think that they have special rights and privileges, when they really don't. Freedom of the press has not been held to mean anything more than the freedom of everybody else to express themselves.
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