I have a quick question about online sexual harrassment and defamation.
My sister and I play an online video game as a hobby. This game is played mostly by adults and is owned by a major entertainment company. There are millions of people who play this game across the world and rules against standards of behavoir while playing within the game.
There is a chat function within the game. About a year ago, harrassment began towards my sister and I after I refused this member entrance into my "guild". He began making statements calling my sister and I extremely offensive things, falsely elluding to our sexual orientation ect. Her husband also plays the game and he has had to witness this man calling her a whore and a slut and saying that he had slept with her. (All of these statements are beyond false).
We reported this member on several different occasions. We began by filing petitions and taking screenshots of the things that he was saying. All of these items were tossed out because they said that they couldn't use screenshots. So basically...it is ok that he is sexually harrassing you and defaming you and we aren't going to do anything about it because you didn't report it properly. So, the next time it happens we follow all of the rules and report him through the proper channels. They still do nothing. Time 3, we report again through proper channels and they do nothing again.
My question is this...is someone allowed to publicly defame someone unprovoked? My second question is if there is a legal channel by which this can be addressed can we also sue the entertainment company as a codefendent for allowing the harrassment to continue once they have been made aware that it is occuring?
Thank you for your time, and any response would be really helpful. -Kylee
One piece of information that I forgot to mention is that they keep telling us to use an ignore function that would make it so we can't see what he is saying. The problem with this is that it doesn't solve the problem, it just covers it up. I put him on ignore only to find that weeks later I had screenshots in my mailbox with him continually making statements about us. They want us to ignore him...then they tell us we need to report him every time he does something....do you see the dichotomy of this situation? We can't report it if we can't see it to report it...but covering it merely masks it and the harrassment continues.
My sister and I play an online video game as a hobby. This game is played mostly by adults and is owned by a major entertainment company. There are millions of people who play this game across the world and rules against standards of behavoir while playing within the game.
There is a chat function within the game. About a year ago, harrassment began towards my sister and I after I refused this member entrance into my "guild". He began making statements calling my sister and I extremely offensive things, falsely elluding to our sexual orientation ect. Her husband also plays the game and he has had to witness this man calling her a whore and a slut and saying that he had slept with her. (All of these statements are beyond false).
We reported this member on several different occasions. We began by filing petitions and taking screenshots of the things that he was saying. All of these items were tossed out because they said that they couldn't use screenshots. So basically...it is ok that he is sexually harrassing you and defaming you and we aren't going to do anything about it because you didn't report it properly. So, the next time it happens we follow all of the rules and report him through the proper channels. They still do nothing. Time 3, we report again through proper channels and they do nothing again.
My question is this...is someone allowed to publicly defame someone unprovoked? My second question is if there is a legal channel by which this can be addressed can we also sue the entertainment company as a codefendent for allowing the harrassment to continue once they have been made aware that it is occuring?
Thank you for your time, and any response would be really helpful. -Kylee
One piece of information that I forgot to mention is that they keep telling us to use an ignore function that would make it so we can't see what he is saying. The problem with this is that it doesn't solve the problem, it just covers it up. I put him on ignore only to find that weeks later I had screenshots in my mailbox with him continually making statements about us. They want us to ignore him...then they tell us we need to report him every time he does something....do you see the dichotomy of this situation? We can't report it if we can't see it to report it...but covering it merely masks it and the harrassment continues.
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