The same is true of the defendant. The statement that he brought that this was a work of fiction cannot in itself exempt the defendant from any responsibility for the possibility of identifying characters from the book with characters in reality.
- This is therefore the main dispute that is about to be decided. The dispute as to the possibility of identifying the plaintiff as a character in the book and the possibility that such identification establishes the existence of wrongs for which compensation can be awarded. A dispute that will be decided by the application of objective tests, where the defendant's subjective intention (malicious intent according to the plaintiff) will be given weight only in the examination of the damage claimed.
- It should be noted that I did not find any substance in the arguments raised by the defendant as preliminary arguments.
The defendant claimed the existence of a court action based on the investigation of the previous claim, but it ended in a compromise and no argument was raised that any of the matters that are the subject of this claim were discussed in its framework. The defendant made no attempt at all to present a decision that might supposedly establish the existence of a court action, nor did he claim that the issue of the book even came up in the previous lawsuit.
The defendant also claimed a statute of limitations, but this claim also remained shrouded in mystery. Indeed, the defendant began publishing the book during 2015 and more than 7 years prior to the filing of this lawsuit (on December 22, 2022), however, we are not dealing with publications that were made during 2015 and plunged into oblivion, but rather with a number of chapters that were also published during 2016 and are still being published close to the filing of the lawsuit. The defendant, who did not petition a separate motion to dismiss the lawsuit in limine on this claim, did not claim that the chapters of the book and the publications involved therein were removed. The defendant also did not claim that information about the book was no longer distributed by him or that it was a one-time publication that was and is no longer a one-time publication. The plaintiff further claimed that even close to the filing of the lawsuit and against the background of the Russia-Ukraine war, the defendant asked to promote the book (for example, paragraph 48 of the statement of claim), and the defendant could not find a reference to this.