An extremely unwell person has - as part of an ongoing smear campaign - falsely accused some people I know, including several friends, of grooming / child pornography by submitting fake claims to a US based site (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) and posting a screenshot with accompanying caption on their Instagram.
It’s an absolute fantasy, a total horror show, the people named who are aware of it are extremely stressed about being falsely accused of such sickening crimes and want to look into their legal options. I’ve no doubt they would succeed in defamation proceedings but due to the nature of what is being alleged I’m not sure if that’s the way to proceed, what legal proceedings would involve for them, or what the outcomes would be (imo this person is dangerous and is going to hurt someone eventually, idk if there’s anything that can be done at this juncture). I’m also not clear what their options are for free/affordable legal counsel in the first instance.
Any tips? Sorry this is so not a Christmas post and it’s so grim and bizarre but if anyone can help I’d be really grateful.
more info
Basically this person is clearly very unwell and it has manifested as an erratic but intense vendetta against a number of people (six in particular, but increasingly more to a lesser extent) in a community they felt shunned from. In many cases all these people have done is made a joke or called out this person’s disgusting / unhinged behaviour even if it was one instance some years ago. They will post rambling and nonsensical but very aggressive insults, pictures of them with rants underneath, completely made-up stories of hate crimes and sexual crimes just to try and get them in trouble; there’s also been very explicit racism, sexism and ableism which has resulted in a handful of posts being taken down but sadly most have remained up because of poor social media moderation.
They hadn’t posted in six months until Thursday but then they posted 56 times in a day. weirdly they posted a pic of their bleeding feet with a caption ranting about a person without naming them, then a picture of that person accompanied a caption about the OP’s feet - alternating so that if you recognise the information about the person in the rant then you can establish a pattern of mismatched captions on foot pics to the person whose picture is in the next post. The racism/ableism/xenophobia in particular is absolutely jawdropping, every single person identified has been accused of grooming underage people - but because their names aren’t mentioned and they’re only identified in the following post, with an unrelated caption, I’m not sure that any of those targeted would have grounds for legal action. Previously they have just ranted about these people underneath the pictures of them, they must have changed this deliberately. then the final post is the screenshot specifically naming the six people they fixate on the most and accusing them of being involved in sexual offences.
The posts across the board are so bizarre and nonsensical that I don’t even know what any authorities would make of them (the first section of both types of post - rant and foot stuff - are repeated throughout but the second half is different each time), and a lot of previous posts are written in Russian. This person’s social media usage and campaign against people has been concerning for a while (18 months?) without necessarily being overtly criminal. They have tried to fight at least one group of people they’ve hyperfixated on in the past and taken steroids to bulk up in advance in order to do so, it failed miserably but there’s clearly been some interest in turning to violence previously…
It’s so horrible scrolling through a mixture of graphic pictures of injuries and then pictures of people you know/care about, and being afraid that your picture might crop up. Ugh it’s awful I know this person is ill but I’m so afraid of what they might do if this isn’t shut down soon