A short excerpt from the long opinion Friday by Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff (E.D. Va.) in Apelbaum v. Bloom:
Plaintiffs Yaacov Apelbaum and XRVision Ltd., a cybersecurity and facial recognition technology expert and his company, filed suit against Defendant Jordan Arthur Bloom, a blogger and journalist, on January 28, 2025. In the original complaint, Plaintiffs alleged that Defendant had made certain defamatory statements about them in a January 29, 2024, Substack blog post (the "First Article") regarding Plaintiff Apelbaum being an "Israeli spy." The First Article was purportedly republished in a November 23, 2024, Substack post (the "Second Article") by Defendant responding to Plaintiffs' cease and desist letter….. {The statements [presented to the jury] were: (1) "Yaacov Apelbaum is an Israeli spy, and the sort of Israeli spy who would have good reasons to smear American facial recognition technology, because his company, XRVision, is a competitor;" (2) "So this is an Israeli spy who's deeply involved in shaping the Hunter Biden story[]" ….}
The jury returned a unanimous verdict against Defendant after about one and a half hours. As indicated on the special verdict form the jury found that Defendant had made the First Article statements with actual malice and awarded $75,000 compensatory damages and $125,000 punitive damages, as to each Plaintiff on each statement.
Defendant moved to vacate the judgment, but the court said no:
