The Defendant Is Nobody
A sentence about Dr. Wren Okonkwo appeared in forty-one places within nine days, and it was not true. Marisol Adeyemi has won defamation cases against newspapers, networks and a sitting senator. She has never had this problem before — there is nobody on the other side of the caption.
The sentence was twenty-two words long and Marisol Adeyemi had read it four hundred times.
Okonkwo's 2019 tissue-culture results were retracted following an internal review that identified irregularities in the underlying image data.
It was clean. It was specific. It had the cadence of a fact — the little appositive, the passive construction that implied an institution behind it, the year attached like a citation. It was the kind of sentence you would skim past without friction, and that was precisely its engineering.
There had been no retraction. There had been no internal review. There had been a 2019 paper, which stood, uncorrected and well-cited, and which had been the foundation of Dr. Wren Okonkwo's laboratory for six years until nine days in March when it stopped being possible for her to raise money.
Marisol had been doing defamation work for nineteen years. She had sued a newspaper of record, two networks, a podcast with an audience larger than both, and a sitting senator who had said something intemperate about a client on a livestream. She knew the shape of these cases the way a surgeon knows an abdomen.
She did not know the shape of this one.
"Forty-one," said Devraj, without looking up. He had six windows open and the posture of a man who had stopped noticing his own spine. "Forty-one distinct domains carrying the sentence or a close paraphrase. First appearance March fourth. By March thirteenth it's in all forty-one."
"Nine days."
"Nine days." He turned the monitor. "And Marisol, look at the ordering. That's the part I keep coming back to."
She looked. He had built a timeline — publication timestamps down the left, domains across, the sentence's mutations color-coded where the wording drifted.
"There's no origin," she said.
"There's no origin I can find. Every one of these is downstream of something. The March fourth item cites 'reports.' Plural. It links to two aggregators, both of which postdate it by a day and both of which cite it back."
"That's circular."
"That's very circular. I traced eleven of them into loops. Not one path terminates in a document, a source, a person, a filing, a journal notice — anything." He rubbed his eyes. "It's not that the source is hidden. I think there wasn't one."
Marisol sat down slowly, which was not a thing she usually did in Devraj's office because there was rarely anywhere to sit.
Nineteen years. The work had a rhythm to it and the rhythm always started the same way: somebody said a thing. A person, with a name, who had made a decision to say it, and who had either known it was false or had been reckless about whether it was. That was the whole architecture of the tort. Actual malice was a state of mind, and states of mind required a mind.
"Devraj. Who do I sue?"
He didn't answer for a while.
"I've been trying to write you a name for four days," he said.
Wren Okonkwo was forty-four and had the specific flatness of affect that Marisol had learned to recognize as exhaustion rather than composure.
"I want to be precise about what I'm asking for," Wren said. "I've had three people tell me I should want an apology. I don't want an apology. I want the sentence to stop existing."
"Tell me what happened with the Halloran grant."
"Nothing happened. That's what's difficult to explain." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table, a gesture Marisol would think about later. "There was no accusation. Nobody sat me down. The program officer was warm. She asked about the 2019 work, which is normal, it's foundational to the proposal. And I explained it, which is also normal. And then she asked — very gently, very reasonably — whether the image-data issues had been fully resolved."
"What did you say?"
"I said there were no image-data issues." Wren looked up. "And I watched her decide that I was being defensive."
Marisol wrote nothing down. She had found long ago that clients said the true thing in the silence after they thought you had stopped listening.
"Four hundred thousand," Wren said. "Then the Bickerstaff renewal, which was two-eighty, and that one nobody even asked me about. Then my second postdoc took a position in Leipzig, which he was entitled to do, and which I do not blame him for at all, and which I understood completely, and which — " She stopped. "I have four people. I had six."
"Dr. Okonkwo, I need to explain something about the case, and I need to do it before you decide whether to spend money on it."
"All right."
"I can't find anyone who said it."
Wren's expression did not change, which told Marisol she had already worked this out for herself and had been waiting to see whether her lawyer would.
"I've read about this," Wren said. "It has a name now, doesn't it."
"Several. None of them are causes of action."
The doctrine problem was not subtle and it did not get better with study.
Defamation required a publication, which she had forty-one of. It required falsity, which was demonstrable and which Devraj had documented to a standard that would have satisfied a hostile examiner. It required damages, and Wren Okonkwo had six hundred and eighty thousand dollars of them, plus a laboratory that was going to close.
And it required fault. A defendant who knew, or who should have known, and who published anyway.
Marisol drafted a complaint against the March fourth domain, got as far as the third cause of action, and stopped.
The domain was registered to a holding company in Nevis. Its output was six to nine hundred articles a day across roughly two hundred properties. There was no masthead. There were bylines, and Devraj had run them: the photographs were synthetic and three of the names returned nothing but other bylines on other properties in the same network.
She was not going to find a person who had decided to say a false thing about Wren Okonkwo, because in all likelihood no person had. Some process had been given a thin summary of a real controversy — there had been a 2019 image-integrity dispute in the field, involving a different lab, at a different institution, whose senior author's surname began with the same three letters — and had been asked to produce nine hundred words. And it had produced them. Fluently, plausibly, in the register of a fact, complete with the little appositive and the year attached like a citation.
No malice. No recklessness. No knowledge. No mind.
Just a system doing exactly what it was built to do, which was to make text that sounded like other text.
"Negligent design," Devraj said. "Products liability. The pipeline is a product, it's defectively designed, it emits falsehoods about identifiable people at scale."
"Against a Nevis holding company with no assets."
"Against everyone upstream. The model vendor, the platform, the — "
"Section 230, immunity questions I'd be litigating for four years, and a client whose lab closes in eleven months." Marisol pushed back from the table. "Dev, I'm not saying you're wrong about the theory. I'm saying the theory is a law review article and she needs a remedy."
They sat with it.
"There's the search angle," Devraj said eventually. "Delisting. It's not a judgment but it's — "
"It's a bandage on forty-one wounds, and there'll be sixty by the time we get an order." She heard how she sounded and softened it. "Which we should still do. Start it Monday."
He nodded. Then, carefully: "Can I show you the thing I found last night? It's not good."
"Show me."
He pulled up a window she didn't recognize.
"This is a research assistant. Enterprise tool, the kind a program officer at a funder would have on her desk. I asked it about the 2019 paper."
The response was four paragraphs. It was measured, well-organized, and appropriately hedged. The third paragraph noted that the work had been subject to a retraction following an internal review identifying irregularities in image data, and attached three citations.
Marisol read the citations. Two aggregators and the March fourth domain.
"It's not repeating the sentence," she said slowly. "It's — "
"It's synthesizing it. It read the corpus, it found forty-one sources in agreement, and it did the thing it's supposed to do." Devraj closed the window. "It weighted them as corroborating. Because that's what forty-one independent sources saying the same thing has always meant."
"They're not independent."
"No. But nothing in that pipeline can tell the difference between forty-one independent sources and one source with forty copies. Neither can I, honestly, and I spent four days on it." He looked at her. "Marisol, the program officer probably didn't read a website. She probably asked her assistant, the way she asks it everything. And it told her, in a completely responsible tone, with citations."
She took the case. She had known she was going to take it since the second sentence Wren Okonkwo spoke, and everything since had been the professional formality of establishing how badly she was going to lose parts of it.
They filed against the Nevis entity, which she expected to default, because a default judgment was a piece of paper that said false with a court's name on it, and that piece of paper could be attached to a delisting request. They filed delisting requests, sixty-three of them, and then eleven more. They wrote to the journal, which issued a statement clarifying that no retraction had occurred, and which was picked up by four outlets and ignored by the other thirty-seven.
By August the sentence appeared in fifty-two places. By October, sixty-eight. The delistings worked, in the narrow sense that the specific URLs stopped surfacing, and failed in the broad sense that the claim had long since stopped needing any particular URL to survive.
It was, Marisol thought, the first case of her career where the opposing party had no interest in the outcome. Newspapers fought. Networks fought hard. The senator had fought disgracefully and at length, and she had enjoyed beating him.
This thing did not fight. It did not know she was there. It had produced the sentence for reasons that were not reasons, and it would go on producing sentences forever, and no part of it had ever formed an intention about Wren Okonkwo or anyone else.
She had built a career on the principle that if someone damages you with a lie, there is someone to answer for it. The principle had not been repealed. It had just quietly become inapplicable, in the way that a law about carriage lamps becomes inapplicable — still on the books, still correct, still describing a world that has moved.
In February the lab closed. Wren took a position at a foundation, running a program that funded other people's work, and told Marisol on the phone that it was fine, that it was good work, that she was surprised how much she liked it.
"I looked myself up last week," she said. "I don't usually."
"And?"
"It's still there. It's got a sort of — settledness to it now. It's not a claim anymore, it's just background. Like it's always been true." A pause. "Do you know what I keep thinking about? Nobody wanted this. Not one person anywhere in the chain wanted anything to happen to me. I've been so angry for a year at somebody who isn't there."
Marisol looked out at the parking structure and the flat white sky.
"That's the part I can't get used to either," she said.
"You'll have more of these."
"I have nine."
"Nine." Wren laughed, once, without much in it. "Well. At least you'll get good at it."
After she hung up, Marisol sat for a while with the file open on the desk in front of her, twenty-two words at the top of the first page, and thought about how the law had spent four hundred years building an elaborate and rather beautiful apparatus for locating the person responsible — and how it had never once occurred to anyone that the answer might come back nobody, and that nobody might turn out to be the most prolific defendant of the century.