Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/20-297_4g25.pdf
Page Number: 21

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

17 

Opinion of the Court 

We agree with the plaintiffs.  Under longstanding Amer-
ican law, a person is injured when a defamatory statement 
“that would subject him to hatred, contempt, or ridicule” is
published to a third party.  Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 
497 U. S. 1, 13 (1990) (internal quotation marks omitted); 
Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323, 349 (1974); see 
also  Restatement  of  Torts  §559  (1938).  TransUnion  pro-
vided  third  parties  with  credit  reports  containing  OFAC
alerts  that  labeled  the  class  members  as  potential  terror-
ists, drug traffickers, or serious criminals.  The 1,853 class 
members therefore suffered a harm with a “close relation-
ship”  to  the  harm  associated  with  the  tort  of  defamation.
We have no trouble concluding that the 1,853 class mem-
bers suffered a concrete harm that qualifies as an injury in 
fact. 

TransUnion counters that those 1,853 class members did 
not suffer a harm with a “close relationship” to defamation 
because the OFAC alerts on the disseminated credit reports
were only misleading and not literally false.  See id., §558.
TransUnion points out that the reports merely identified a 
consumer  as  a  “potential  match”  to  an  individual  on  the 
OFAC list—a fact that TransUnion says is not technically
false. 

In looking to whether  a plaintiff ’s asserted harm has a
“close  relationship”  to  a  harm  traditionally  recognized  as
providing a basis for a lawsuit in American courts, we do 
not  require  an  exact  duplicate.  The  harm  from  being  la-
beled a “potential terrorist” bears a close relationship to the 
harm from being labeled a “terrorist.”  In other words, the 
harm from a misleading statement of this kind bears a suf-
ficiently close relationship to the harm from a false and de-
famatory statement. 

In short, the 1,853 class members whose reports were dis-
seminated to third parties suffered a concrete injury in fact
under Article III.