Beating an Anti-SLAPP Motion to Save a Franchise's Name

The situation

Selam worked as an office manager for a mid-sized employer in Brampton, and her husband Bohdan worked full time as an IT support lead. A few years earlier, the two of them had bought a franchise location of a national meal-prep delivery brand as a side investment — the kind of business that runs mostly on its own once it is set up, staffed by a small crew who prepared and packaged orders for pickup and delivery. It was never meant to consume their evenings, and for a while it did not.

One of their part-time staff, Oksana, had worked at the location for several months before being let go for repeated scheduling problems and cash-handling discrepancies that Selam had documented at the time. Terminations like that are common in small operations and usually end there. This one did not.

Selam handled most of the day-to-day staffing decisions herself, since Bohdan's full-time job left him little time during the week. She kept a simple written record of scheduling issues and shift discrepancies as they came up, mostly out of habit rather than any expectation she would need it later. That habit turned out to matter far more than she could have guessed at the time.

From complaint to defamation

Within weeks, a string of one-star reviews appeared across several platforms under different account names. They were not ordinary complaints about slow delivery or a wrong order. They stated, as fact, that the location had failed a health inspection and continued operating anyway, that it knowingly sold expired food, and that Selam and Bohdan had been caught pocketing cash meant for a charity fundraiser the location had briefly hosted. None of it was true, and the specificity was the problem — vague criticism is usually just opinion, but concrete, checkable claims of illegal conduct are a different thing entirely.

Defamation law in Ontario draws a real line between opinion and fact. Saying "the food here isn't fresh, I wouldn't order again" is protected commentary, even if unfair. Saying "this business failed a health inspection and hid it from customers" is a factual assertion that can be proven true or false — and if it is false, and it damages someone's reputation, it can support a lawsuit. Within a month, new customer orders at the location had dropped noticeably, and a catering contract with a nearby employer was cancelled after someone forwarded the reviews to the office manager there. Selam and Bohdan came to Treadstone Law wanting the reviews gone and the record corrected.

What we did

1. Traced the reviews back to their source. The posts used different names, but writing style, posting times, and details only a former insider would know pointed to one person. We gathered screenshots, metadata where available, and a timeline connecting the posts to Oksana's termination date.
2. Sent a formal notice demanding retraction. Before filing, we wrote to Oksana setting out the specific false statements, why they were defamatory rather than opinion, and a deadline to remove them. This step matters for more than good faith — Ontario's Libel and Slander Act imposes notice requirements in some defamation contexts, and giving clear notice up front strengthens a claim regardless of exactly how a court characterizes the publication.
3. Filed a defamation claim in the Superior Court when the notice period passed with no response, seeking removal of the reviews, a retraction, and damages for the lost business and reputational harm.
4. Responded to an anti-SLAPP motion. Oksana, now represented by her own counsel, moved to have the entire claim dismissed under Ontario's anti-SLAPP legislation — provisions designed to stop lawsuits used to silence people speaking on matters of public interest, such as consumer warnings about a business. Her position was that the reviews were protected commentary about food safety, a genuine public interest topic, and that the lawsuit was an attempt to punish her for speaking up.
5. Built the record the motion would turn on. An anti-SLAPP motion does not ask whether the statements were true. It asks whether the expression relates to a matter of public interest, and if so, whether the harm to the plaintiff is serious enough, and the merit of the claim strong enough, that allowing the lawsuit to continue is justified despite the value of protecting that expression. We obtained the location's actual health inspection history showing no violations, records of the terminated employment and the cash discrepancies behind it, and evidence of the concrete financial harm — the cancelled catering contract and the drop in weekly orders, both measurable against the location's own sales history.
6. Argued that this was personal, not public-spirited. The core of an anti-SLAPP defence for a plaintiff is showing the expression was not really about warning the public — it was aimed at a specific person after a specific grievance, using fabricated specifics rather than honest opinion. We drew the timeline directly from termination to first post to argue exactly that.

The outcome

The motion judge sided with Selam and Bohdan. The court found that while food safety can be a matter of public interest in the abstract, these particular statements were demonstrably false, targeted a specific business by name rather than raising a general concern, and caused real, quantifiable harm that outweighed whatever public interest value the posts carried. The motion was dismissed, and the court ordered Oksana to pay the costs of bringing it — a meaningful signal about how weak the motion had been, and one that changed the tenor of the case immediately.

Anti-SLAPP motions are meant to screen genuine public-interest speech out of costly litigation early, before either side reaches a full trial on the facts. That same early screening cuts the other way when a defendant tries to use it as a shield for something that was never really about warning the public. Losing a motion meant to end a case quickly can leave a defendant worse off than if the motion had never been brought, both in costs and in how the court's findings on the motion shape everything that follows.

With the motion out of the way and a full evidentiary record already built, the defamation claim itself was strong, and Oksana's lawyer opened settlement talks rather than proceed toward trial. The case resolved with Oksana removing every post, publishing a written retraction and apology on the same platforms where the reviews had appeared, and paying damages of roughly $175,000 to cover the lost catering contract, the measurable drop in orders, and the reputational harm the false claims had caused. Selam and Bohdan never had to sit through a trial, and the location's review scores and order volume recovered within a few months of the retraction going up.

The case took a little over a year from the first false review to the final settlement — longer than either of them expected, largely because of the detour through the anti-SLAPP motion. That detour, though, is exactly why the record mattered so much from the start. Cases like this are won or lost on documentation gathered early, long before anyone knows a motion is coming.

What you can learn from this