The privacy laws in the United States include a non-public person's right to protection from publicity that creates an untrue or misleading impression about them.
[1] False light differs from defamation primarily in being intended "to protect the plaintiff's mental or emotional well-being", rather than to protect a plaintiff's reputation as is the case with the tort of defamation[2] and in being about the impression created rather than being about veracity.
If a publication of information is false, then a tort of defamation might have occurred.
Generally, these elements consist of the following: Some U.S. state courts have ruled that false light lawsuits brought under their states' laws must be rewritten as defamation lawsuits; these courts generally base their opinion on the premises that a) any publication or statement giving rise to a false-light claim will also give rise to a defamation claim, such that the set of statements creating false light is necessarily, although not by definition, entirely within the set of statements constituting defamation; and b) the standard of what would be "highly offensive" or "embarrassing" to a reasonable person is much more difficult to apply than is the state's standard for defamation, such that the potential penalties for violating the former standard would have an unconstitutional or otherwise unacceptable chilling effect on the media.
[5] The states that do recognize it will not allow a plaintiff to maintain suit for both false light and defamation.