When law enforcement won’t help, citizens always have another option: hit the bad guys in the wallet. But it’s not that easy. The forensic work of identifying anonymous online perpetrators is expensive, and many attorneys won’t take the cases because the individual trolls usually don’t have much money to cough up even if you can find them. It’s a powerful defense, invoking the First Amendment in a defamation case—and in this particular one, Gilmore’s opponents may hold additional firepower. Because he spoke to the media about the car attack, they say, the court should treat him not as a private citizen but as a “limited-purpose public figure.” That’s an important distinction because public figures face a much higher standard of proof. They must show not just that the statements about them were false and harmful but that the statements were made with “actual malice”—with full knowledge that they were false or with a reckless disregard for the truth. What would a ruling against Gilmore on this point mean? His lawyer worries that it would create a devastating precedent. “Every witness to a crime or a terrorist attack or anything else is a de facto public figure simply because they saw something horrible”. Just think about Gilmore’s fraught decision to tweet his video. “The consequences would be potentially dire because it would make people certainly think twice before sharing what they saw.”

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