The word "libelous" is correct and usable in written English
It is typically used in legal contexts to describe a false statement that damages someone's reputation. Example: "The article was deemed libelous, leading to a lawsuit against the publication." Alternatives include "defamatory" or "slanderous."
Hamilton argued that controversial articles printed in Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal were true and therefore could not be considered libelous.
From Mainz he wrote libelous letters, which led to his arrest in March 1590.
Although Pasternak hoped for the best when he submitted Doctor Zhivago to a leading Moscow monthly in 1956, it was rejected with the accusation that "it represented in a libelous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union".
His disgrace was deepened when his enemies produced more libelous pamphlets dressed up as supplements to the Histoire.
"I hope they have a factual basis that they can demonstrate for their defamatory and libelous allegations," he said.
This is a scurrilous and libelous attack on my character, with a political agenda that is both nakedly transparent and totally contemptible – and unfortunately one that is completely in character with the tactics of my opponents".
He said that the implication that he had run an operation to suppress African-American voters, which could be a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was "false and close to libelous".
The night before, the attempt to hang this thing on a poor — and still missing — Indian-American student at Brown, had been crazy, not to mention libelous, not to mention heartbreaking to his family.
In 1953, another major revival of "Porgy and Bess" — starring the young Leontyne Price, fresh out of Juilliard — prompted James Hicks, the reviewer for the Baltimore Afro-American, to declare Gershwin's labor of love "the most insulting, the most libelous, the most degrading act that could possibly be perpetrated against the Negro people".
Everyone complained that pamphlets and poems were breaking kids' ability to concentrate, that big good handmade books were ignored, swept aside by printed works that, as Erasmus said, "are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad".
A series of journal entries by a writer who may be Herman Melville reveals what agonies he must go through with his book (perhaps "Moby Dick") because of the chance that some of the material in it may be libelous.
