Lessons From Selling Sunset, Part Two: Workplace Gossip

• Published date: 19 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Employment and HR, Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Discrimination, Disability & Sexual Harassment, Health & Safety, Libel & Defamation
• Law Firm: Roper Greyell LLP ' Employment and Labour Lawyers
• Author: Ms Katelin Dueck and Mike Hamata

It's time for the second instalment in our three-part series on employment law lessons learned from watching Netflix's Selling Sunset. As always, there are spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution.

Selling Sunset

If you are new to this series of articles, we are thoughtfully extracting employment law lessons from the fan-favourite reality TV program, Selling Sunset. The show follows some of L.A'.s most successful women realtors, as they compete with the cutthroat L.A. market and each other.

Workplace gossip: Takeaways

It is no surprise that drama abounds in a televised program featuring an inherently competitive workplace. Much of the most notorious pot-stirring takes the form of savage office gossip. The problem with office gossip is that it tends to leak out and cause interpersonal conflicts among co'workers.

A prime example of this occurs in thrilling episode 8 of season 5 (titled "Karma's gonna get you"), when the women of the office gathered for a lavish British-themed tea party, as you do. The realtors arrived to the party decked out in their finest frilly hats and the tea started pouring - literally and figuratively (for the uninitiated, Urban Dictionary defines tea as gossip or personal information belonging to someone else). It didn't take long for tensions to boil over (pun intended). Soon enough, everyone was shouting over each other and nearly every sentence began, "but you said that she said that - ". Suffice it to say, no one left the tea party lukewarm.

Let this serve as an example: while gossiping about a colleague may be a frequent occurrence, it is not as harmless as it may seem. In addition to the hurt feelings and damaged morale, there are also legal risks associated with workplace tea spilling.

1. Defamation

If you choose to share your office gossip with outside parties you could be opening yourself up to a civil claim of defamation. If you suspect that defamation claims might be limited to the world of reality TV, you are mistaken. In Booton v. Synergy Plumbing and Heating Ltd, 2019 BCSC 276 an employer inaccurately indicated to some employees that a former employee had been terminated for theft. Consequently, the employer was required to pay damages for defamation.

To make out a claim of defamation, the following must be shown:

• the defendant made a defamatory statement, in the sense that the impugned words would tend to lower the plaintiff's reputation in the eyes of a reasonable person;
• the words in fact referred to the plaintiff...