After a New York dentist filed a lawsuit against a patient for leaving a negative review on Yelp, the popular review site for unsatisfied business patrons has added a warning to his page notifying consumers that he might sue the hell out of them if they do the same.
BuzzFeed reports Monday that Dr. Nima Dayani filed defamation suits against Mary Rohs and “at least four” other patients who’ve left similarly scathing reviews, claiming their words have “have harmed his practice over time.”
Rohs’s review, which is still on Dayani’s Yelp page, reads:
In court documents, Dayani says he did, in fact, diagnose her, and that claiming otherwise amounts to an accusation of malpractice. “When you are publicly accusing someone of malpractice,” he said, “you are damaging their reputation.”
Speaking of damaging someone’s reputation, this is what you’ll see after arriving on the Yelp page for Dayani’s little shop of lawsuits right now:
In a statement provided to BuzzFeed, Yelp’s vice president of public policy said:
“When you as a consumer share your honest opinion in some type of public way on Yelp or otherwise, it can mean negative reviews. Businesses, rather than responding diplomatically or using feedback to improve operations, go out and hire a lawyer waging that the consumer who wrote this review is more likely to pull the review off than hire a defense attorney and defend themselves. By merely threatening, it doesn’t take going to court to bully the person in order for that business to censor the user.”
The lawsuit is “ongoing,” and I’m going to wait even longer to make that appointment.