Two tea partiers have sued the founders of the Tea Party Patriots for defamation, alleging that they posted false information about one being a child molester and the other being a victim of rape and child molestation, under the Facebook alias “Dale Buttersworth.”
James Lyle and Kylie Kremer allege that Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin and her husband, TPP’s CEO Lee Martin, defamed them on “a public group in Facebook,” and that the “Internet Protocol Address, cell phone and email addresses on file with Facebook for the user, screen-name of alias ‘Dale Buttersworth’ belong to both Jenny Beth Martin and Lee Martin.”
There is currently no “Dale Buttersworth” account on Facebook that is publicly viewable (though there are several “Dale Butterworth”s), and the suit makes no mention of which public page the comments were posted on.
But according to Kremer’s complaint, on October 5th of last year, “Dale Buttersworth” falsely wrote in a post that Kremer “had been raped, reported the rape to the police and was kicked out of her home by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend as a result of reporting the rape.”
Lyle’s complaint alleges that “Buttesrworth” falsely wrote that he was “guilty of having raped, the minor daughter of his girlfriend and was a child molester.”
Kremer was listed as an intern in a 2009 on a posting on the Tea Party Patriot’s Facebook page, and Lyle is an organizer for the Tea Party Express.
via Courthouse News.
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