"In other words," the lead prosecutor, Jonathan C. Benedict, asked, "having her falsely state to him that he had made admissions during a blackout".
Forbes, an American magazine, did him no favours by publishing an article in December which, in the words of his own spokesman, did "falsely state Mr Berezovsky responsible for murder and running a criminally corrupt business organisation".
Some of the sites falsely state that cigarettes bought over the Internet are tax-free, the suit charges, despite laws that require purchasers to pay excise and sales taxes on cigarettes bought for use in the state.
Later, he began presenting other original compositions under his own name, and didn't like to be questioned about those earlier works; he would evade such questions, or else he would falsely state that he had found the manuscripts of the compositions in old libraries.
Of course, it was also once defamatory in the United States to falsely state that a white person was black.
For many years and in most states, it was considered defamatory per se -- something that would be presumed to harm one's reputation - to falsely state that a straight person was gay.
