Two spurned women who got sued by a Manhattan lawyer for branding him a low-life Lothario on the Web were all smiles today after his suit got tossed out of court.
Former roller-derby queen Stacey Blitsch and Amanda Ryncarz hailed the ruling at a Los Angeles news conference celebrating their victory over ex-lover Matthew Couloute Jr.
Ryncarz — who says Couloute dumped her over the phone five days before marrying someone else — called the decision “not only a victory for myself, but for women across the country who are currently suffering the same type of injustices.”
“I believe that women should be able to express their feelings about men in their lives without the fear of being sued,” she said.
Blitsch, who has a son with Couloute, said: “I hope this case will be a wake-up call for people everywhere to just be honest, tell the truth and treat people the way you want to be treated.”
The gals’ lawyer, feminist firebrand Gloria Allred, called the decision an “important, precedent-setting opinion in the evolving body of law concerning the Internet.”
Allred said Manhattan federal Judge Harold Baer Jr. “has advanced women’s rights by making it clear that women have the right to express their opinions about former lovers…without fear that they will be dragged into court.”
“Given the fact that legislatures and courts do not protect women against liars and cheaters, women helping women by warning them may be the only means by which women can protect themselves,” Allred said.
In his ruling, Baer said Couloute, a former Connecticut prosecutor, had failed to show that his former girlfriends intended their poison-pen postings to hurt his budding solo law firm.
“Even though plaintiff’s reputation has suffered, I am unwilling to take the leap from generalized comments calling plaintiff a ‘liar’ and a ‘cheater’ — on a Web site called ‘liarscheatersrus’ no less — to actions directed at specific business relationships,” Baer wrote.
The judge also refused to let Couloute revise his suit — which alleged “tortious interference with business relations” — to include a charge of defamation.
Baer sided with arguments by Ryncarz and Blitsch, who denied posting anything, that the rants were merely “hyperbolic statements of opinion.”
“The average reader would know that the comments are ’emotionally charged rhetoric’ and the ‘opinions of disappointed lovers,'” Baer wrote.
Couloute said he was “disappointed” by the ruling, and vowed to appeal.
He also said he’s gotten “tons of phone calls and emails from people who are in a similar situation,” and recently launched a nonprofit Web site called savecyberspace.com because “this issue’s not going to go away.”
“The suit was never about cheating, or whether I was faithful, but about what you can print on the Internet and the harm it causes to people’s lives,” Couloute said.
“It’s hard to find lawyers that know enough about this to take these kinds of cases forward, and I think I’m going to use my skills to help them.”