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Neither Federal nor State legislators - nor judges - care whether or not a crime is victimless. See e.g. the War on Drugs.
That makes defamatory speech easier to restrict by reducing the plaintiff's burden of proof.
Defamation is also a 3-pronged test, assuming that you aren't talking about a public figure. It needs to be false (truth is an absolute defense against defamation), you need to have either known that it was false, or have had reckless indifference to the truth, and you need to have caused some kind of measurable harm (and hurting your feelings isn't a measurable harm). All of that is played out against a field of lawyers in a civil suit that charge by the hour. Defamation is actually quite challenging to win in the US, unless the person that is alleging defamation has a lot of money to spend on attorneys to buy the defendant.