Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Giuseppe (Joe) Morrone, a practising lawyer, sued Maral Mirzoian and Rafi Mirzoian for defamation and injunctive relief over negative reviews they posted on Google Reviews.
• Quebec's Superior Court dismissed both claims on November 7, 2024, finding the comments were not defamatory and that no compensable harm had been proven.
• Establishing defamation under Quebec law requires proof that the impugned statements actually brought the plaintiff's reputation into disrepute, not merely that they were capable of doing so.
• Personal distress — such as the stress and anxiety Morrone reported — is insufficient on its own to ground a defamation claim.
• On appeal, Morrone raised no error of law, arguing only that the trial judge wrongly assessed the evidence and should have found the comments defamatory.
• The Court of Appeal refused to reassess the evidence afresh, as no palpable and overriding error — the applicable standard of intervention — was established.

Facts of the case

Giuseppe (Joe) Morrone, a practising lawyer, brought two separate actions against Maral Mirzoian and Rafi Mirzoian before the Superior Court of Quebec, district of Montreal. He sought damages for defamation and an injunction arising from negative comments the Mirzoians had posted about him on the Google Reviews platform. The Honourable Geeta Narang of the Superior Court dismissed both actions by judgment dated November 7, 2024 (Morrone c. Mirzoian, 2024 QCCS 5017). Morrone then appealed to the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Legal standards at issue

No specific contractual clauses or policy terms were at issue in this case. The central legal question concerned the standard for establishing defamation under Quebec law: a plaintiff must prove not only that the impugned statements were capable of harming their reputation, but that those statements actually brought their reputation into disrepute, assessed through the objective standard of the reasonable person. This requirement was drawn from the Supreme Court of Canada's decisions in Prud'homme c. Prud'homme, 2002 CSC 85, and Bou Malhab c. Diffusion Métromédia CMR inc., 2011 CSC 9. Notably, Morrone's original pleadings had alleged only that the comments were "likely to negatively affect" his reputation — a formulation that fell short of the required threshold.

Reasoning and analysis

The trial judge examined the context in which the comments were published and concluded that, while the reviews may have been ill-advised or disparaging, a reasonable person would not have taken them at face value. Such a person would have understood that the authors had simply had a negative experience with the lawyer, without inferring any genuinely blameworthy conduct on his part. The judge further found that Morrone had produced no evidence that his reputation had actually been brought into disrepute. His reported stress and anxiety upon reading the comments were held to be insufficient to establish compensable harm.

On appeal, Morrone did not allege any error of law. He argued instead that the trial judge had wrongly refused to find the comments defamatory and had erred in concluding that no compensable harm was established. The Court of Appeal held that this amounted to an invitation to reassess the evidence de novo, which is impermissible under the applicable standard of palpable and overriding error — a standard all parties agreed applied. Applying the Supreme Court's framework from Prud'homme and Bou Malhab, the Court confirmed that personal feelings of stress and anxiety are insufficient to ground a defamation claim; the harm must be assessed at the level of how others perceive the plaintiff. The Court also noted that a secondary ground of appeal — challenging the trial judge's suggestion that the comments were not even capable of harming Morrone's reputation — appeared a priori arguable, but declined to rule on it as it was unnecessary to dispose of the appeal. The Court clarified that its decision should not be read as implicitly endorsing that portion of the lower court's reasoning.

Ruling and overall outcome

The Court of Appeal, composed of the Honourable Geneviève Marcotte, Christine Baudouin, and Frédéric Bachand JCA, dismissed the appeal in its entirety on June 5, 2026. The successful parties were Maral Mirzoian and Rafi Mirzoian. Costs were awarded against Morrone, though no specific monetary amount was stated in the decision.