Workplace Defamation — the Framework
A rumour spread among colleagues, a manager's remark or a false assessment recorded in a working document is assessed within the same legal frame as any defamation — the Civil Code has no special norm for the workplace. There are two grounds: Article 18 — a person has the right, through the court, to protect his honour, dignity, privacy or business reputation; and Article 993 — a person who intentionally or negligently disseminates facts harmful to the property of another person must compensate the damage if the facts are evidently incorrect. The peculiarity of the workplace is that the false information directly affects career and income — and therefore its protection is not a matter to postpone.
One further circumstance: workplace defamation almost always spreads in a closed environment — a department, correspondence, private conversations — and therefore establishing it requires witnesses and documents. Correspondence and internal documents are the main source here: they fix the time, the author and the content simultaneously. Where no document exists, witness statements remain — and their timely fixation is decisive.
The Employer's Liability — Article 997
In workplace cases Article 997 has special significance: a person is obliged to compensate the damage which his employee caused to a third person by an unlawful act in the performance of his labour (service) duties — and no liability arises if the employee acted without fault. Where false information is disseminated by a manager or colleague in a service context — at a meeting, in official correspondence, in a reference — the victim faces the question: against whom to bring the claim, the author or the employer. Article 997 regulates exactly this chain: where a service connection exists, liability passes to the employer as well.
Internal Rumour or Dissemination of a Fact
Article 993 concerns precisely the dissemination of facts — and this works in the workplace context too: if a colleague expresses an opinion, that is an assessment; if he disseminates a concrete assertion — for instance that the victim allegedly concealed or violated something — that is a fact, and its evident falsity must be established. The exception is the same: no compensation arises for statements serving the protection of lawful public interests. In the workplace this balance often becomes the subject of the court's decision: whether the statement was an assessment made in a service interest or the establishment of a false fact.