'''Please don’t talk about how to or how not to run a business in your class. You have never shipped as much as a landing page.
You have a rating of 1.8 on RateMyProfessor.
This is a review of your course:
“Waste of my time and money. Likes to talk politics most of the time and honestly comes across as a poseur who has recently acquired liberalism and pop culture. 100% insincere instructor.”

I don’t think you should be teaching at all.'''

I tweeted this out to a US based professor, and he is threatening to sue me in Germany. I live in Berlin, he lives in New Jersey. The review exists and is a verbatim quote, the rating is true

But the professor claims that the reviews on RMP were by troll accounts and not actual students. He informed this to me, but didn't provide me any legally relevant evidence, just asserted. And he claims now that he has informed they are fake, I have to remove the tweet.

I didn't respond. After that one tweet i moved on, completely disengaing, doing nothing, including not deletion of the post.

He sent me some nasty DMs on X and a nasty email.

Should I take this any seriously at all? Seems like bluster??



—
Vincentvolaju91

14 comments

  1. Just in case, show it to a lawyer, if you know one with defamation experience, but I think this sounds like a silencing tactic, if I ever heard of one…

  2. Fyi. to sue for defamation he has to prove to the court that he lost money because of your post which I highly doubt he will be able to do.

  3. I think it’s bluster. The phrase “consider yourself served” is totally meaningless: he doesn’t have anything to serve you with yet. Neither does he need your phone number to “officially” inform you of his intention to sue.

    If you receive a letter of some kind from a lawyer, that’ll be the time to take it seriously and lawyer up.

  4. I’m not going to read the whole thing but if someone asked me for my phone number to “offically tell me about their intention to take me to court” I’d have a good laugh and continue going about my day.

  5. My honest opinion: It’s a small world and we are all humans. Let’s just live peacefully. I suggest you to agree with him that if you remove the post, he would not do any legal actions. Just a simple cease and desist. Your post does attack him quite a lot and may affect his livelihood.

    Now if you insist to keep the post, then the best approach is to ignore him and prepare your lawyer contact if you get served officially via mail or something like that.

  6. You don’t need to provide him anything. Also he has to file a suit like that in Germany, which involves getting a laywer here that gets your personal information through X and then serves you with something. It’s going to cost a ton of money, just for what someone said on X? And yet the degree of “defamation” has to be determined and since he is a professor at a university, he is a person of public interest at that point.

    It’s not going anywhere, he’s mostly talking shit. “Consider yourself served” rofl, what a POS.

  7. I’m pretty sure (not a lawyer) that defamation involves you KNOWINGLY sharing false info that could be considered defamatory and this is already public information, if anything the person that posted that on RMT would be responsible in that case, if it could be proven false.

    Personally I would not even reply and just block them tbh.

  8. You don’t have anything to worry about until you are actually served with legal paperwork.

    Some guy saying “consider yourself served” doesn’t actually count as being served. You have to be served the paperwork in your hands, physically.

    You’re also under no legal obligation to help him out in his own legal case against you by giving him your telephone or address. You are free to ignore any communications from him and block him.

    Sounds like he’s a thin-skinned idiot who is trying to scare you into deleting your tweets, and probably deserves low scores from his students.

  9. Tell him that based on your extensive legal research the Ligma principle applies

  10. There is a Reddit on “legal advice Germany*, so maybe ask there.

    As far as I know, you cannot “serve” someone on the phone, through a message! 
    So, his sentence”consider yourself served” is not to be taken seriously, I think. He is just threatening you. You can only serve via a proper lawyer-written letter which is is sent to your address and delivered in person by someone!

    Also, in Germany defamation implies that someone was maliciously trying to spread false information about someone. He should have to prove that you actually don’t think of him as incompetent, and still tried to make him seem incompetent by spreading what you know is false information. None of this applies here.

    But then, if he is trying to sue you from the US and you are in Germany, who knows how it works and what laws apply! So, still be careful! 
    Suing someone is very expensive, though,  and I don’t think he will see it through.
    He honestly seems like a jerk. 
    Keep all his emails and screenshot of his messages, just in case. Do not respond in any way, in order to avoid mistakes.

    As a side note: I don’t think that tweeting this kind of thing about a professor is a smart thing to do, regardless how incompetent he might be. If they know who you are, this could damage your career in the future. It might be used as a reason not to offer you a PhD, not yo hire you in a company, etc. imIt will be viewed as very unprofessional, aggressive behaviour in any work environment.

  11. I mean, surely if anything, the review would be defamation, not your sharing of the review. If he, as he claims has concrete evidence that the reviews are fake then he should share them with rmp and get them to take them down. I doubt he does as they are likely real reviews. The fact that he reacts so shows hes not an overly professional person.
    Furthermore, pursuing legal action across borders, especially from outside the EU is difficult and expensive. This is all just bluster, I wouldn’t take it seriously. If he goes so far as to pursue legal action the first thing theyll do is ask you to take it down. Then you can decide what to do.

  13. Its pretty evident those reviews are fake. Why did you use them at all?

  14. From his messages alone I’m willing to bet that review is accurate lol. Dude sounds like a complete idiot.

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