I must ask for your sympathy for certain former members of the Tea Party movement - because if the details of the lawsuit are true, they have been grievously abused (not snark).
Two tea partiers have sued the founders of the Tea Party Patriots for defamation, alleging that they posted false information about one being a child molester and the other being a victim of rape and child molestation, under the Facebook alias "Dale Buttersworth."
And ...
James Lyle and Kylie Kremer allege that Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin and her husband, TPP's CEO Lee Martin, defamed them on "a public group in Facebook," and that the "Internet Protocol Address, cell phone and email addresses on file with Facebook for the user, screen-name of alias 'Dale Buttersworth' belong to both Jenny Beth Martin and Lee Martin."
TPM
Kremer was listed as an intern in a 2009 on a posting on the Tea Party Patriot's Facebook page, and Lyle is an organizer for the Tea Party Express.
Assuming for the moment that the IP address, cell phone, and email addresses do belong to the Martins - this is not just defamation, this is just sick stuff. The article does not say what prompted the defamation. If this is an attempt by the Martins at payback it seems to be backfiring. It may be Republican humor at its finest - the powerful denigrating the weak always seems to get a yuck from some conservatives.