How a coordinated defamation campaign around Hulda Clark produced a landmark California Supreme Court ruling on internet publisher liability
Barrett v. Rosenthal became one of the most frequently cited cases in American internet law — a foundational precedent on the scope of Section 230 immunity for online publishers and users. Its origins were personal and specific: a sustained campaign of defamatory statements, first authored by Hulda Clark's publicist Tim Bolen, then republished thousands of times over by Ilena Rosenthal across newsgroups and websites.
In November 1999, Tim Bolen — doing business with his wife Jan as "Jurimed," an organization describing itself as assisting alternative health practitioners facing regulatory action — began distributing statements alleging that Dr. Terry Polevoy was "dishonest, closed-minded, emotionally disturbed, professionally incompetent, unethical, a quack, a fanatic, a Nazi, a hired gun for vested interests," and had engaged in criminal conduct including stalking. Parallel statements were made about Dr. Stephen Barrett and attorney Christopher Grell.
According to internet postings at the time, Hulda Clark's son Geoffrey had hired the Bolens in September 1999 to assist with Clark's Indiana legal matter. Bolen's campaign against Barrett, Polevoy, and Grell followed shortly after.
Ilena Rosenthal republished these statements — by Dr. Polevoy's own tally, drawn from Google Groups archives, she posted more than 50,700 messages to Usenet between 1995 and September 2006, at a sustained average of roughly 130 per day. More than 1,500 of those posts referenced Dr. Polevoy specifically by name.
In early November 2000, Dr. Barrett, attorney Christopher Grell, and Dr. Polevoy filed suit in California against Hulda Clark, the Bolens, Jurimed, David Amrein, the Dr. Clark Association, and others alleged to have spread or conspired to spread the defamatory statements.
The case ultimately turned on a narrower legal question specific to Ilena Rosenthal's role as a republisher rather than an original author: whether Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act — which shields "interactive computer service" providers from liability for third-party content — extends the same absolute immunity to individual users who knowingly and repeatedly republish defamatory material.
Following the litigation, Rosenthal's attorneys — led by David Shagam, Mark Goldowitz, and Paul Clifford — attempted for several months to force Dr. Polevoy to pay a judgment related to the case by seeking an assignment against his Ontario Health Plan income. On July 9, 2008, Judge Stephen Dombrink of the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda, denied the request outright.