“Watched a few minutes on Evelina Hahne’s YouTube video where she tells about her inspiring story of how she went from a civil engineer to a Nazi housewife. But what I react to the most is that she looks so damn inbred”.
So read a post on X, then Twitter, in early 2023. The tweet was a comment on Evelina Hahne’s YouTube video “How I Went From Being a Career Woman to a Housewife”.
There she talks about her choice to, among other things, give up her professional career to become a housewife instead.
Got right in litigation
On Tuesday, the Malmö district court sentenced the 22-year-old woman behind the post to pay 10,000 kroner in damages. Half of what Evelina Hahne demanded.
– What she wrote are very rough things. I have two small children and live in central Stockholm, so I move around a lot among people during the day, and it’s scary that her post has been seen by over 21,000 people, she says, and explains:
– I have previously been exposed to physical threats, received letters home and received threats online.
According to the district court, Evelina Hahne has been subjected to defamation in connection with the post. The court believes that the film had no clear links to any right-wing extremist views. In addition, they believe that the film did not invite a political discussion.
“The roughness of it”
The 22-year-old has later published further comments where she, among other things, called Hahne a “toad” and wrote that “Nazis deserve to die”. The court ruled that the person had no reason to attribute Nazi sympathies to Evelina Hahne – and that the comments should be considered offensive.
– That’s precisely the grossness of it, calling me a Nazi when I really am not. And her audience who can resort to violence if they get the hang of it, says Evelina Hahne.
In the judgment, it appears that the 22-year-old believes that her claims are justified, as Evelina Hahne is an opinion leader and has run for a political party. Furthermore, she believes that Hahne did not suffer any harm, but used the lawsuit as a strategy to intimidate dissenters into silence.
Evelina Hahne, for her part, believes that she has certainly been offended by the claims – and that at the time the posts were written, she had no connection to either Alternativ för Sverige or any other party.
The lawyer: That constitutes defamation
Litigation about defamation is unusual, but there are previous guiding legal cases, says Ängla Pändel, lawyer and chairman of the Institute for Law and the Internet.
– There have been occasions when people have proposed because they believe that naming someone a Nazi is a value judgment. If it is a value judgment, it falls outside the defamation provision, says Ängla Pändel.
Value judgments are calling someone ugly, stupid, an idiot, rubbish at their job and so on. But the law distinguishes between value judgments and information. One task might be to say that someone has committed a certain crime, that they were not only bad at their job, but also did something reprehensible at work, such as embezzlement.
In this case it was about whether “Nazi” was a value judgment or a task. The district court interpreted it as an assignment, and therefore it fell within the defamation provision.
– Using “Nazi” as a swear word falls outside the defamation provision, but if you claim that a person has “Nazi connections”, it is a factual statement that can constitute defamation.