It doesn't apply in this case, but what should someone do if they lack the financial resources to sue for libel after someone has ruined their life by creating a popular opinion that they are irredeemably guilty?

One thing I've never understood is why people believe legal recourse should be considered recourse at all. It's only recourse if you happen to have the money to pay for it.

In my case, I have a family member who has been dealing with a very expensive civil parenting time and custody issue, involving some severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges against the other party.

The state I'm in has routinely ignored those pending charges, even ignored impassioned testimony and warnings from mental health professionals whose medical records were required for the case, all saying that the other party is a serious danger to children and, at minimum, must be strictly supervised.

The state has tried time and again to quickly wrap up some cookie-cutter 6-month supervision program and get it back to full, unsupervised parenting time.

Literally the only reason why we've been able to protect my family member is that we've spent an absolute fortune (an amount of money that has me personally teetering on financial ruin at this point) to have a very expensive lawyer dive deeply into every single thing we can argue to prolong the supervision.

And this is all happening while there is a separate criminal case pending against this other party! You'd think the civil parenting time case's judge might take notice of that and perhaps think it prudent to see if this person will be convicted, as many mental health professionals' testimonies seem to confirm.

But no, instead they just look up some parenting time guidelines in a three-ring binder, bang the gavel, and try to get you out the door as fast as possible -- truly no concern whatsoever for the well-being of the child or the grave danger of the circumstance.

In the case I'm describing, we're talking about something that is practically black and white, obviously based on dangerous criminal charges with a huge mountain of evidence against them. And the justice system still requires you to spend huge amounts of your own money just to get even the barest minimum of justice, in this case protecting a child.

I'd also like to add that the magic suggestion of having the judge award legal fees is also unrealistic, and one reason is that you often cannot stay solvent long enough for the magic future legal fee award to come back to you and fix things.

In the current circumstance I'm in, we've had our time wasted by the opposing counsel, we've had to repeatedly file motions to get the court to force the other party to comply with things like interrogatories, yet it is the court's job to ensure compliance, not ours, but we paid for it anyway. The judge has completely dismissed all requests for court fees.

In fact, one of the issues of this case is that the other party is somewhere around $4000 in arrears in child support payments, and the judge hasn't even ordered the other party to pay that back or anything. The other party's driver's license was suspended for a time (but the person drove around town, we even saw them, regardless), but no other penalty. And they successfully applied for a hardship license that removed the court order against them -- still without ever paying the back-owed child support.

My mother works as a courtroom clerk and in her experience, this is how it goes 99% of the time. Lawyers just take money from you for an indeterminate amount of time while the court sits on its ass, regardless of how lopsidedly obvious the case is, and regardless of how much obvious danger there is.

For people less fortunate than us, who couldn't have afforded the legal fees this long, their child would have simply been given over into regular, unsupervised parenting time with an obvious, alarmingly dangerous person, and no one in the legal system would have given two shits about it.

If you have a spare $100k lying around, you might be able to protect your kid for a time. Otherwise, no one cares and your kid can just stay with the dangerous person. End of story.

I can only imagine that if you want to sue for slander or libel or something, even if it's absolutely black and white that you were falsely depicted and had your reputation ruined, it's going to cost you personally an unbelievable amount of money.

It's not really justice. It's pay-per-justice, or something.