devastating impact the publication could have on the Respondent, it behoved the Appellants to properly check out Mr Mahlangu’s information before publication. [45] Moreso as the untruthfulness of the publication was established in the trial. I say this because the Appellants failed to prove the truthfulness of the assertion that Mr Mahlangu is Gelane’s father. In our constitutional dispensation, no one has the carte blanche to denigrade the reputation and dignity of another and then seek to hide behind the spurious defence that he had no reason to believe that the allegation that led to the defamation was false. The defamer must show the reasonableness of that belief. So, in a case such as the one we are faced with, where the only working tool the Appellants’ bothered to rely on was the pathetic, inconsistent and unreliable ramblings of Mr Mahlangu (a fact which leaped out from the record), there was in my view, no reasonableness in the Appellants’ belief. I cannot fault the court a quo for reaching this conclusion, as it did in the excerpt of the impugned judgment recounted above, and for discarding Mr Mahlangu’s evidence. [46] In view of the circumstances potrayed above, the Appellants were required to take the appropriate steps to ascertain the veracity of the information gleaned from Mr Mahlangu before proceeding to publication. They failed to do this. They failed to seek out and interview any of the Dubes (Gelane’s maternal family) inspite of Mr Mahlangu’s emphatic assertions that the Dubes knew the facts of the Respondent’s paternity. This is moreso as there is uncontroverted evidence that the Respondent was born at and grew up at her maternal homestead. DW2’s allegation that he did not do this because 30