“Israeli Spy” Allegations Against Consultant Involved in Examining Hunter Biden’s Laptop May Be Defamatory
From yesterday’s opinion by Judge Michael Nachmanoff (E.D Va.) in Apelbaum v. Bloom:
Yaacov Apelbaum is the founder of XRVision, Ltd., a cybersecurity and analytics company. Plaintiffs Apelbaum and XRVision … attracted media attention in 2020 for their role in examining Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, purportedly “analyz[ing] the contents” of a copy of the hard drive “to determine the legitimacy of the [l]aptop.”
[Defendant] Jordan Arthur Bloom … is an independent journalist who maintains a blog on the platform Substack. On January 29, 2024, Defendant published an article, “The Role of Yaacov Apelbaum in the Hunter Biden Drama” (“First Article”)…. The alleged defamatory statements in the First Article include:
- “Yaacov Apelbaum is an Israeli spy, and the sort of Israeli spy who would have good reasons to smear American facial recognition technology, because his company, XRVision, is a competitor.”
- “XRVision has provided sourcing to a bunch of conservative publications, including the Washington Times. So this is an Israeli spy who’s deeply involved in shaping the Hunter Biden story.”
- “What the case of Apelbaum actually represents is how badly the conservative movement has been penetrated by Israeli intelligence, at the level of human intelligence and technology contracting.”
- “It is a sad thing to watch an old man and American president be run around like this by dual loyalists and spies.”
These statements were published on Defendant’s Substack and also to thousands of viewers on Twitter and other platforms, then were “subsequently and virally” republished on other websites. Defendant intentionally failed to conduct any investigati
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