: Re: Should I create a fictional college if students go missing in my script? I’m writing a fictional drama/crime/mystery sceenplay. In my script, college kids go missing from a REAL University.

@Holmes449

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You are asking for legal advice, on whether you slander or libel the college in question, which even a lawyer would have to read everything you write about the college in order to provide you with advice.

I am not a lawyer. However, as you can see from the TV series "Suits", it is important to their story line that ALL the lawyers in the law firm Mike works at (Mike is the MC) graduated from Harvard Law, specifically. Mike is a fraud that has used hackers, forgeries and his own skill to pretend to be a graduate, and in their story fictional professors (and I think fictional students) of Harvard Law are blackmailed or corrupted into corroborating his story. (Harvard Law itself, however, is not presented as a routinely corrupt organization.)

So it obviously is possible to use a real (and famous) college, and even imply some fictional professors and administrators are bad apples and their information security leaves room to be hacked so frauds like Mike might exist.

But that is not legal advice; in the end it depends on the college, whether they choose to sue you for defamation or whatever, and whether your publisher's editor is willing to use a real name or not. So unless using an ACTUAL college is very important to the plot of your story (e.g. it MUST be an actual Ivy League college), I personally would set the story in a fictional private college and imply the status with who attends it and how much it costs.

That's the safe route, if the story can still work. If not, spend a day researching what exactly constitutes slander, libel, defamation, etc, use the real name but try to avoid those, and risk being rejected for what an agent or publisher regards as crossing the line. Be aware that a rejection letter may not tell you that is their reason for rejecting you; doing so may constitute legal advice on their part, which they will refrain from giving. They would likely send you form letter A1, something like "Thanks for considering us. Unfortunately this work is not a good fit for us at this time."

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