Libel Suit by "King of Vape" Against N.Y. Post, Over Allegations of Misconduct and Anti-Israel Actions, Thrown Out
A libel suit filed by the 'King of Vape' against the New York Post has been dismissed by a Florida court. The court ruled that the plaintiff, a public figure, failed to adequately allege actual malice in the defamation claims. The plaintiff's attempts to amend the complaint were deemed insufficient and in bad faith, leading to the dismissal with prejudice.
- ▪The plaintiff operates vape retail stores in Florida and claimed the New York Post published false statements about him.
- ▪The court determined that the plaintiff is a public figure, requiring him to meet a higher standard of proof for defamation.
- ▪The plaintiff's amendments to the complaint were seen as an attempt to evade the court's ruling on his public figure status.
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| Original publisher | Reason.com |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/30/libel-suit-by-king-of-vape-against-n-y-post-over-allegations-of-misconduct-and-anti-israel-actions-thrown-out/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 13:34:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T13:49:38.246Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T13:58:41.675Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rC0QTCHAp2KC |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Free Speech Libel Suit by "King of Vape" Against N.Y. Post, Over Allegations of Misconduct and Anti-Israel Actions, Thrown Out "Plaintiff's allegations in [an earlier] complaint let the cat out of the bag that he is a public figure. He cannot put the cat back into the bag in the hope of keeping his case alive." Eugene Volokh | 5.30.2026 9:34 AM From Judge Sheri Polster Chappell (M.D. Fla.) yesterday in Shriteh v. NYP Holdings, Inc.: This is a defamation case. Plaintiff operates seventeen vape retail stores in southwest Florida under the trademark name "the King of Vape." Christenson, writing for the New York Post, authored and published an article about Plaintiff titled, "Florida's Israel-hating 'King of Vape' Faces Bipartisan Crackdown on Sale of Illicit, Kid-Friendly Chinese E-cigs."…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason.com.
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