• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 12, 2009

A judge in Texas has ordered the site Topix to reveal identifying information about 178 anonymous commenters who allegedly defamed two residents online.

The commenters had written about Mark and Rhonda Lesher, a Clarksville, Texas couple indicted last April for sexually assaulting one of Mark Lesher's former clients. Mark Lesher is an attorney and Rhonda runs a salon. The couple was acquitted last month.

But in the nine months that the criminal case was pending, people posted more than 25,000 comments to Topix message boards about the charges, according to the 365-page lawsuit. For instance, one commenter allegedly wrote: "Mark Lesher is a coward that hides behind women, when he is not drugging them and raping them," according to the complaint.

The Leshers sued 178 commenters for defamation and asked the court to order Topix to disclose any information that could identify them. A judge in Tarrant County granted that request and ordered Topix to comply with a subpoena by March 6.

Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, said the company was still studying the court's order. "We take the privacy of our users very seriously," Tolles said. "We're trying to make sure that whatever is asked for here is reasonable and balances the need for freedom of speech against the needs of the court." He added that the site does not have commenters' email addresses.

Other judges throughout the country have faced similar requests, but most have not ordered Web sites to unmask commenters without first finding that the plaintiffs could potentially win a libel claim.

"There's been case after case after case where judges are showing a lot of respect for anonymous speech on the Internet," said Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizen Media Law Project.

Making that determination would appear to involve evaluating the evidence against each commenter individually, Bayard said.

Whether the Leshers can win a libel claim might depend on whether they are considered public figures--in which case they would have to prove that the commenters posted their statements with reckless disregard for the truth. Private figures in Texas need only show that their reputation was harmed by untrue statements that commenters made negligently.