The businessman behind online “malicious smears” about presidential candidate Jim Gavin was successfully sued for almost €500,000 last year for spreading defamatory claims on social media.
A US court ruled Kieran Kelly, a former Waterford fisherman who lives in Indonesia, used his large social media following to make false and damaging claims against a business rival.
In recent weeks, Mr Kelly has posted derogatory claims concerning Mr Gavin, who is Fianna Fáil’s candidate for president, that went viral across several social media platforms.
The posts, which were offered without any evidence and concern Mr Gavin’s private life, were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. They have since been removed from most platforms following complaints from the Gavin campaign.
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In 2019 Mr Kelly, who describes himself as a registered Republican and “Trump loyalist”, founded an environmental business in Indonesia that removes waste from the water.
It claimed to use newly invented technology to remove large amounts of plastic waste from the seas for recycling.
In 2022, Mr Kelly’s company was sued by a Danish company called Resea Project, which was engaged in similar work.
The Danish company alleged Mr Kelly was using social media to spread false claims about them that severely damaged their business and reputation.
This included false claims that Resea mixed oil into the plastic waste it collected and that it dumped recovered plastic back into the water. Mr Kelly also falsely claimed the company was involved in fraud and “corporate greenwashing”.
Resea said these claims were part of an “ongoing social media blitz of false and negative information” about the company on Mr Kelly’s social media accounts. It said he used hashtags and tagged influential people to ensure maximum reach for the claims.
The US District Court in west Texas found these claims were “literally false”. It also strongly criticised the manner in which Mr Kelly approached the case.
In a judgment issued last year, Judge Jason Pulliam said the Waterford man engaged in “abusive and sanctionable conduct”.
When Resea made efforts to advance the case, Mr Kelly did not respond in kind, the judge said. “Instead, he has responded with additional wrongdoing and ever-increasing belligerence.”
Mr Kelly refused to appear for a deposition until ordered to do so and when he did appear “he then lied repeatedly” and interfered with Resea’s attempts to depose other witnesses.
Last September, the judge issued a judgment in default against Mr Kelly after the defendant stopped engaging with the case. He imposed a permanent injunction on Mr Kelly preventing him from posting further false claims about the Danish company and ordered he pay a total of $577,741 (€494,798) in damages and interest.
Court documents show Mr Kelly later attempted to appeal but this was rejected.
Mr Kelly refused to comment on the case on Thursday, instead making a series of accusations against The Irish Times and claiming that he would release thousands of pages of documents next week that will bring down the Government.
A spokesman for Resea said it “does not wish to comment on Kieran Kelly, his companies or his working methods”.
Mr Kelly has refused to provide any evidence for his claims about Mr Gavin, claiming it will be released shortly before polling day.
The claims have drawn an angry response from the Gavin campaign, which called them “invented and utterly false”.
“I refuse to accept that the price of participating in public life should involve having to put your family and friends through waves of online abuse and malicious smears. This is not the cost of service – it is a failure of our digital culture,” Mr Gavin said in a statement earlier this week.
