Closing Statement
Good evening, your honour, opposing counsel, and other distinguished guests of the court.
May it please the court,
Throughout the case of this trial we have seen the plaintiff present a number of poorly written and flimsily justified arguments in an attempt to convince you that my client is a liar. The defense urges the court to examine the facts of this case critically, and to ask itself a simple question: has there been enough proof presented to the court to demonstrate, or even make it seem likely, that the defendant defamed the plaintiff?
On the facts
The situation present in this case is an odd one - any observer would be remiss not to admit that. On February 3rd, Alexandrian News published a mysterious article containing cryptic symbols. This prompted mild intrigue for some, as evidenced by the witness testimony provided, but overall did not cause a public stir. Nevertheless, it was unprofessional and unbecoming of a news organization. It is clear that Alexandrian News felt the same, as the article was later deleted, and a follow-up article containing an explanation was posted.
This follow-up article revealed some strife within the organization. Its publisher made it clear that the plaintiff, Dearev, was responsible for the previous article, communicated that he had been fired, and expressed some disdain for him. No doubt, there had been an altercation of some kind behind the scenes.
Despite this article being made public, it appears that it had little to no impact. It did not stay up for long, being deleted by staff, and the plaintiff has only shown that one singular observer even thought anything of the series of events. This singular observer noted that they had not heard anyone else talking about the article. By all accounts, the court has been shown that there was no widespread attention, positive or negative, garnered by either article in question today.
Who posted the article?
The question remains regrettably unanswered. While the defense has made (unfortunately unsuccessful) efforts along with the defendant to find solid proof that the original, mysterious article was not created by Plura, all trace of it has been removed. The defense has cooperated with court requests to provide chat logs in an attempt to uncover the truth, even providing logs in video format despite not being required to, but no record remains of the article containing the symbols. What can the court gleam from this? As the honourable magistrate correctly pointed out, someone must have posted the article and deleted the message in the Alexandrian News channel. The plaintiff, who had access to post in this channel, had motive to do this. While no hard proof could be found, it remains true that Dearev had every reason to remove the traces of him having posted the unprofessional article, likely for justified fear for his standing within the company, seeing as he was later terminated. This remains the defense’s position, and was the timeline of events communicated by the defendant both to his legal counsel and to the public. Without any kind of evidence to the contrary presented by the plaintiff, neither the court nor the defendant’s counsel have any reason to believe that this is not what happened.
What constitutes defamation?
The No More Defamation Act, along with well-established common law principles, outline three basic conditions for a statement or publication to be classified as defamation: it must be published, it must be false, and it must have damaged one’s reputation. This precedent was established in bigpappa140 v. BelatedDragon35 [2023] FCR 63 and upheld mere days ago in Vernicia v. RylandW [2025] FCR 5 – the court opinion provided in the latter outlines an excellent and extremely up-to-date precedent for proving defamation that is directly consequential for this case. It is obvious that the article shown in P-002 was published, even if briefly. Therefore, the court must rightfully consider whether the publication was demonstrably false, and whether it was demonstrably damaging to Dearev’s reputation.
On the burden of proof and the balance of probabilities
In all civil cases, and particularly for defamation, the burden of proof lies with the plaintiff to demonstrate that the claim in question was false. The federal court dismissed Unitymaster v. xEndeavour [2025] FRC 16 because the plaintiff failed to provide evidence that the statements they alleged to be defamatory were false. The judge for this case noted specifically that the case was dismissed due to the plaintiff failing to provide evidence that the statements were false. Further, the district court dismissed xEndeavour v. AlexanderLove [2025] DCR 1 because the plaintiff (once again, specifically) failed to provide any proof that damage had occurred to the plaintiff’s reputation due to alleged defamation. This dismissal was later upheld by the federal court in an appeal, xEndeavour v. AlexanderLove [2025] FRC 12. Thus, all established precedent dictates that the burden of proof remains on the plaintiff to provide evidence that the allegedly defamatory publication was both false and damaging to the plaintiff’s reputation. Further, this proof must overcome the balance of probabilities, as established in §13.1.a of the Judicial Standards Act and reaffirmed in the aforementioned court opinion in Vernicia v. RylandW [2025] FCR 5.
Therefore, the court must ask itself this: has the plaintiff provided enough proof to overcome the balance of probabilities in asserting that the article published on Alexandrian News and showcased in P-002 was both false and damaging to Dearev’s reputation?
In short, no.
The plaintiff has failed, despite ceaseless calls for such and even the close cooperation of the defense, to provide any evidence whatsoever that Dearev did not publish the article in question. The line of events established by Alexandrian News and the defense is that Dearev posted the article and deleted the message in the Discord publications channel – this claim is far from unlikely, because the court knows for a fact that someone did such. The plaintiff has no standing to dispute this claim, because no evidence was provided to substantiate it.
Further, the plaintiff has failed to provide any evidence that their reputation was tangibly harmed by the article, regardless of its author. It cannot be understated the significance of the fact that the plaintiff’s own witness, who was called to the stand purportedly to prove damage to reputation, admitted that he had not heard of a single other person even discussing the article in question. The article was very quickly deleted, and thus could not possibly have had the reach to cause any amount of damage to Dearev’s public reputation. Undoubtedly, this very case has received more attention than the allegedly “defamatory” article ever did. The court cannot rule, given the evidence (or lack thereof) and testimony provided, that the plaintiff has sufficiently overcome a reasonable balance of probabilities to prove either claim necessary for a publication to qualify as defamation.
Thus, the defense respectfully and emphatically urges the court to award no prayer for relief to the plaintiff, and thanks the presiding magistrate and the opposing counsel for their time.
