It's harder for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that Ya Boi might be considered what's called a "limited purpose public figure," which makes it a lot harder to prove defamation -- if someone is a public figure you basically have to prove either the person who made the statements acted with a reckless disregard for the truth, or acted with "actual malice," i.e., they set out to lie in order to damage the plaintiff.
Actual malice doesn't refer to a malicious state of mind or desire to harm, but to making statements with actual knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard as to their truth or falsity. A desire to harm is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish it. You could openly intend to destroy the target of your statements utterly, but if you made sure what you were saying was true, or at least made appropriate efforts to ensure it was true, there is no "actual malice," a misleading term of art.
That seems pretty provably false, and not something you could chalk up to a mistake, and pretty clearly something done with the specific purpose of harming Meyer.
It is provably false, and what is more, the events Waid lied about transpired entirely in public and the evidence of it was readily available. Waid either knew what he was saying was false, or acted with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity, doing nothing to verify whether his statements were truthful, which is an inevitable inference from the fact that even the most cursory examination of what happened would have shown that the claims were outright false.
The anti-CG side is obsessing over the defamation part because it seems like the most guaranteed part for Waid. Is it really that in the bag?
If it consisted solely of the typical infantile "Nazi Nazi" name-calling, it probably would be. People generally don't take accusations like that seriously, although in the current time of screeching low-information hate mobs, even such vapid accusations carry some weight among the extremely stupid and imo can still be damaging.
However, Waid made some pretty specific and pretty clearly false factual allegations that would tend to be harmful, and the judge could view whether they actually did cause the claimed harm as a question for the jury.
This would preclude disposing of the claim on a motion to dismiss or, subsequently, a motion for summary judgment.
The tortious interference claim could conceivably actually be decided in favor of the plaintiff on summary judgment, especially if the actual content of the phone call itself gets established conclusively in discovery.
I think it probably won't, because whether or not it actually caused the decision to breach the contract is a fact question for the jury.
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