Someone hacked her disqus account to hate muslims? It's a pretty laughable defense. I wrote all the other bad things, but the worst, totally wasn't me. Someone jumped on your laptop and wrote it for you?
The thing is, someone else using her account is both possible and plausible.
Civil suits hinge on a preponderance of evidence ("who has more"), and if "same email" is all Benton had to go on, that might not be enough to surmount "anybody could have done it," regardless whether she did actually write it.
Benton didn't know for sure, apparently didn't care that he didn't know for sure, then went ahead and stated something as fact that he didn't actually know. Heck, Viola might be able to find a route to actual-malice via the apparent recklessness of an actual trained journalist (and beyond...) making an assumption about someone else that could have life-altering consequences.
It's going to be difficult to have more evidence that someone else wrote it when a logged in user account she admits to using wrote it. I didn't do it, but yes, that is my account. The message seems consistent with ideology she seems to have.
Maybe don't write hate speech if you don't want to be held accountable for it. Seems simple enough. Or at least a trained journalism professor should know how to better anonymize their hate speech. I have no sympathy for her being held accountable for her writing.
I don't think it's admitted that it's the same account. And the archive in the article does not seem to archive the comment. They link to a Breitbart story, but I do not see any comment by "truthseeker" in that archive.
It's not clear to me that it's even the same "truthseeker", it could be a different spelling, etc.
That's not the way the law works. She doesn't have to have evidence that someone else wrote it, the defendants have to have evidence they know she did. Because they doxxed her for it...which would appear to be something you do have sympathy for.
