A judge has issued a $14 million judgement against a man for "harassment" which involved posting the information of a real estate agent online whom he accused of engaging in extortion and harassment to coerce another man's mother into selling a commercial property. Was this actually a fair and just ruling or was the judge heavily biased? The man which was ordered to pay the $14 million was the founder of and a ran a website called The Daily Stormer, which some say is Neo-Nazi. The accusations against the real estate agent, who is Jewish, took on a little bit of an antisemitic tone. The man's name is Andrew Anglin, and he lived in Montana. He refused to come to court, and refused to hand over any of his personal financial information to the court. As a result, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen issued a default judgement against him, in favor of real estate agent Tanya Gersh. Gersh says she had agreed to help Richard Spencer's mother sell commercial property she owns in Whitefish amid talk of a protest outside the building. Sherry Spencer, however, later accused Gersh of threatening and harassing her into agreeing to sell the property. Gersh claims anonymous internet trolls bombarded her family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin published their personal information, which even included a photo of her young son. Gersh's April 2017 lawsuit accused Anglin of invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of the Montana Anti-Intimidation Act. Neo-Nazi website founder accused of ignoring $14M judgment | AP News Should Anglin really be fully to blame for the harassment? Is he to blame since he posted personal information, even though it was other anonymous people sending hateful and threatening messages to her through the internet? It seems to me $14 million in damages is drastically excessive, and that this may have been based on the judge's personal hate and contempt for the defendant rather than logic and justice. Though originally born in Ohio, Anglin claims to be living outside of the US and his current whereabouts are unknown. So it seems like federal judges in the US are issuing orders against people in other countries because of publicly sharing personal information and making accusations on the internet. I think there are some huge international jurisdictional issues here. This also seems like another example of the recent trend that has been called "the criminalization of information". At what point does accusing other people publicly fall outside of freedom of the press protections? There does not appear to be any evidence that the accusations were not true. Did sharing the woman's personal information cross the line? Maybe it is only sharing information when that information will be expected to lead to internet harassment?
