So Facebook is a major source of information for the Charley Project. A lot of people make posts, or set up Facebook pages/groups, about their missing loved ones, and police departments and nonprofit organizations also post about them. If the missing person had a personal Facebook page it is often a very good source of photos of them, in particular ones showing scars or tattoos. It seems like the first thing a person does after they get a tattoo is post about it: “Hey, new ink, what do you guys think?”
I do feel like I have to be careful about what information I take off of Facebook though. This is in particular relating to cases where family members have accusations against specific people. Many times they’ll post all sorts of evidence on the Facebook pages, such as texts and court documents, naming and shaming their suspect and calling on them to come clean. But if that suspect is not being publicly named in the news reports about the case, I will not post their name on the Charley Project.
It’s mainly a self-protection thing. People have threatened to sue me SO MANY TIMES over the years for posting stuff they don’t like. The reason no one ever actually has sued me is because I only post what is officially reported; I can point and say “Here, it was published in this news article on this date so I have every reason to believe it is true. Go sue the newspaper if you like.” But newspapers have standards (or at least they are supposed to, lol) and anybody can say anything in a social media post, you know? I do not want to expose myself to any legal trouble, nor accidentally accuse any innocent person. Because sometimes the people a missing person’s family or friends suspect did it, didn’t do it.
One time, quite a long time ago, there was a woman who went missing and her family were quoted in the newspaper saying they thought her boyfriend did it. They said there was a history of domestic violence between them and that he was controlling and she was afraid of him. I reported in the Charley Project, “The family thinks her boyfriend did it” and the domestic violence etc. A year or two later the boyfriend contacted me, absolutely furious. He said what the family had said was a pack of lies and that he had no idea what happened to his girlfriend and he had some kind of high military clearance and if he had been involved in domestic violence he wouldn’t have gotten that clearance. He demanded I remove the information.
I emailed the woman’s family (who had been in touch with me previously) to tell them about this and asked if they had any proof of what they had said in the newspaper, saying I felt I was in a difficult positiion. They didn’t reply, and after a week of waiting for an answer and hearing nothing, I removed the info about the boyfriend and emailed him to say I’d done so–just as he was writing me saying he was going to see a lawyer today about suing me since I’d ignored him. Our emails crossed ways and then I had to write again saying “I literally just messaged you…” Once he realized I’d done what he asked me to do, he became conciliatory and thanked me for trying to help find his girlfriend, whom he said he loved and wanted to marry.
I think, probably, he wouldn’t have been able to sue me because I was simply reporting that her family said XYZ, which they indeed had said, in the newspaper interview. If this was defamation they were the ones defaming him, not me. But I didn’t want an innocent man to be wrongly implicated on my site.
I don’t know if the missing woman’s family was correct about the domestic violence and so on with the boyfriend but they were wrong about him being involved in her disappearance. Eventually another person altogether was charged with her murder, and there was physical evidence to support it.
The Charley Project Blog 