What is a cease and desist letter?

What a cease and desist letter is

Also called a demand letter, it is correspondence between parties. It typically identifies the conduct complained of, states the legal basis for the objection, demands that the conduct stop by a stated date, and describes what the sender will do otherwise. It is used across defamation, trademark, copyright, harassment and contract disputes.

A demand letter is not a court order

This is the point that gets lost, and it is worth being blunt about. Sending a letter creates no obligation on anyone. The recipient can read it, ignore it, publish it, or reply with a refusal, and none of those responses carries a consequence by itself.

The consequence only arrives if you file. A real case means a complaint, service, motions, discovery, cost measured in months of lawyer time, and a public docket that becomes part of the searchable record about both of you. The federal courts' plain English overview of how civil cases work in the federal courts is the clearest short description of what that involves, and most defamation claims run in state court on a broadly similar path.

What it can and cannot do

A cease and desist letter can	A cease and desist letter cannot
Put the recipient on notice, in writing, on a date	Compel anyone to do anything
Prompt voluntary removal from someone who did not realise the risk	Bind a platform, which is not the publisher of what its users post
Reach an insurer, an employer or in house counsel who will take it seriously	Remove anything from search results
Document your objection for a later claim	Stop the statement being repeated elsewhere
Open a negotiation without filing anything	Create a legal obligation of its own

The second column matters most for online content. A letter to Google or Yelp about a user's review runs into Section 230, explained on what is Section 230. Platforms act on their own policies, and a demand letter is not one of the inputs.

The defamation cease and desist, specifically

If you do send one over online content, precision is the whole game. It should identify each statement complained of, quote it exactly, explain why that statement is a false assertion of fact rather than an opinion, and say what you want done. The elements it needs to track are on what is defamation of character.

A vague or overstated letter is worse than no letter. It signals that nobody has assessed the claim, it invites a public response, and if the underlying statement turns out to be opinion or true, it becomes evidence that you threatened someone over protected speech.

There is now a specific rule about doing that to a customer. The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials makes it unlawful to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a knowing public false accusation to prevent a review being written or to get one removed. The relevant provision is 16 CFR 465.7, and the agency's plain language summary is in the FTC's own Q and A on the Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule. Separately, the Consumer Review Fairness Act at 15 U.S.C. 45b makes contract clauses that bar or penalise honest customer reviews unenforceable. Both are covered on the FTC review rule and is it illegal to buy reviews.

It is also worth knowing what the letter is not accepted as. Google's legal removal request process takes court orders and legal claims of specific kinds. A demand letter you wrote to someone else is not part of that process.

The Streisand effect risk

The term comes from a 2003 lawsuit over an aerial photograph of a coastal property, which drew far more attention to the image than it had ever attracted before. The pattern it names is reliable: an attempt to suppress something becomes more interesting than the thing itself.

Applied to a demand letter, the mechanism is concrete. The recipient can publish your letter, and people do. Communities that follow legal threats amplify them. A local outlet covering the dispute produces a new article, and the new article is indexable, ranks for your name, and is about the dispute rather than the original complaint. One review can become a story, and a story is much harder to move than a review. What that looks like afterwards is covered on what is search suppression.

The legal version of the same risk is anti-SLAPP. Most states now have a statute letting a defendant seek early dismissal of a claim aimed at protected speech, often with your side paying their legal fees. Threatening is free. Following through on a weak threat is not.

When to send one, and when not to

1. Confirm the statement is a false assertion of fact, not an opinion and not true. If it fails this test, stop here.
2. Preserve the evidence first, with URL and date, before anyone edits or deletes anything.
3. Try the platform's policy route first. It is free, fast, private, and it resolves a large share of cases without any letter at all.
4. Decide honestly whether you would actually file. A threat you will not follow through on costs credibility and gains nothing.
5. Have a lawyer licensed in the relevant state write it. The cost of a properly scoped letter is small next to the cost of a misfired one.

Do not send one over a truthful negative review, over an opinion, over an anonymous account you cannot identify, or over an accurate report of a public record. Do not send one when the publicity of the dispute would clearly cost more than the original content.

Nothing here is legal advice, and whether a letter helps depends on facts and on the law where you are. The agency guidance and the court materials are linked so you can read the primary sources. Deciding whether a letter is the right instrument at all, or whether the situation calls for a policy complaint or for changing what ranks, is the first thing a reputation audit establishes.