Homolka Loses the Latest lawsuits

Three recent cases that Homolka brought against journalists doing their job by reporting troubling information about him and his history of misconduct have just been decided overwhelmingly against him.

In the first case, the District Court of Berlin rejected 93% of his claims against journalist Alan Posener, who first broke the story about the scandal around Homolka in Die Welt in April 2022. The court refused to make Posener, who was sued personally, pay any damages at all to Homolka. In other words, 93% of the facts that Posener reported about Homolka’s long litany of misconduct was substantiated enough to be covered publicly in a news story.

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In two other cases, Homolka’s attempts to prevent Die Welt and Der Bild from publishing information about his misconduct were rejected by the German Press Council.

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Have You Been Sued by Homolka?

If you or someone you know has been sued or sent a cease and desist warning by Walter Homolka’s attorneys I would like to hear from you. There is a feeling that anyone who has spoken out critically about Homolka and his conduct has been attacked through the legal system. While it is known that Homolka’s attorneys challenged nearly every journal article that dared to raise troubling issues about his history of misconduct, rumor has it that even individuals who testified to the university commission investigating Homolka or the law firm hired by the Central Council of the Jews in Germany to investigate Homolka have been hit with legal challenges, identified based merely on Homolka’s reading between the lines of these individuals’ statements.

For most individuals, receiving such a legal challenge, especially one that comes with a potential financial penalty, can be intimidating, even frightening. Most people don’t have extra money to pay for a lawyer to fight off such a challenge. Additionally, the idea of spending years entangled in the legal system trying to fend off such a challenge — merely for reporting one’s experience — is highly unattractive, to say the least. That seems to be the point of such legal challenges: to frighten, intimidate, and silence. Legal scholars speak of their “chilling effect“: “the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction.” Corporations and other entitities with great wealth and power often use what are now called SLAPP lawsuits, “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” (See here, for instance.)

So, if you or anyone you know has received a legal challenge from Homolka’s attorneys, please get in touch with me. If Homolka has been using the legal system to silence legitimate reporting, this can be brought to the attention of the courts, with the goal of ending his legal harassment.