Rarely is anything done l’toeles! People just convince themselves that the loshon horah they are spreading or the reason they are butting into someone else’s business is l’toeles. Rarely is someone in a position to really help someone make a true tikun in their lives. Rarely is someone kind, generous and knowledgeable enough to know how to give mussar or be metaken someone so that they take it the right way and want to make that change. If you try to be metaken someone and the way you do it will not have a good affect on them, then you have no business minding their business. If you know they will not listen to you then it is asser for you to approach them because you are making the situation worse. So again, as I said, rarely is any of this l”h or busybody business l’toeles.
So the first thing you would need to do is OWN up to your responsibility and be accountable for your “MISTAKE” and learn from it big time. Then do whatever you can to correct it by first apologizing to the person that you hurt. Then speaking to everyone and anyone who heard this rumor and letting them know that YOU were the source of the rumor and you were 100 percent mistaken and that you take full responsibility for speaking Loshon Horah and saying things that turned out to be untrue. You should also let them know what a huge lesson you learned from this experience.