I would still suggest that contacting editors is a more effective means than the downsides of litigation.

Still, if there is someone acting in a dedicated fashion and operating out of bad faith, litigation might be the most appropriate avenue as you suggest.

More importantly, “contacting a Wikipedia editor to invoke stronger protection mechanisms” is hardly an effective means of countering something like this. They rarely do that on request, and there’s a chance of it backfiring, drawing more attention to something you’d rather ignore.

Folks also should try to understand that Wikipedia’s oversimplified notion of what “notability” means is actually part of the problem: When a person’s importance is measured in terms of “Google Hits,” people like the perp in the Livingston case are going to go all over the web to create as many as possible, and there are plenty of sites that will let them.