The South Florida Sun Sentinel did not defy a court order last week when it published confidential information about Nikolas Cruz’s education record, lawyers for the news organization argued.
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A lawsuit filed against S-Town’s creator, a senior producer for This American Life, accused the Peabody Award–winning podcast of exploiting its subject in life and following his death.
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A Vermont man sued a local newspaper for defamation, appealing the case to the Vermont Supreme Court. The paper challenged the lawsuit under Vermont's "anti-SLAPP" law.
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An appeals court in California tossed a lawsuit filed against the San Francisco Chronicle by a now-disbarred lawyer who claimed the newspaper defamed him. The appeals court affirmed dismissal based on California’s anti-SLAPP law.
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Attorneys for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an anti-SLAPP motion, asking a Florida state court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit against the President of News for Univision over an opinion column he published about a Colombian attorney.
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Rick Blum, Policy Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, writes about President Trump's recent legal threats against the author and publisher of "Fire and Fury" to illustrate the need for stronger legal protections for journalists' reporting and other protected speech.
Read more here.
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Rick Blum writes:
"President Donald Trump’s legal threats against the publisher and author of the most recent insider account of the White House may strike a nerve with journalists who are fearful of expensive legal defenses and chill valuable news reporting, but the threats could lose much of their power if states or Congress strengthened a tool that judges may use to dismiss meritless lawsuits involving speech protected under the First Amendment."
Read more here.
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A Des Moines, Iowa attorney brought a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and one of its reporters. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick says it “seems like a pure SLAPP lawsuit.”
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Defendants in a defamation suit brought by a candidate for the state legislature successfully had the lawsuit thrown out under Vermont's "anti-SLAPP" law. On appeal, the Vermont Supreme Court found "no error" in the lower court's ruling.
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The North American Olive Oil Association filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta against Dr. Mehmet Oz, claiming that the TV personality made disparaging statements about the quality and purity of its members’ products on his talk show...
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From Sasha Moss at R Street: Donald Trump has promised that if he becomes president, he’s going to “open up those libel laws so when The New York Times writes a hit piece we can sue them and win money.” To date, he’s already filed six libel suits. Highlights include his recent suit against Timothy O’Brien, author of “Trump Nation,” for asserting his net worth isn’t as high as Trump claimed it is, and toward comedian Bill Maher, who requested Trump prove he’s not the “spawn of an orangutan.”
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A former County District Attorney filed a defamation lawsuit against a local newspaper, but a judge dismissed the suit based on the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Both parties appealed, with the defendant newspaper fighting the decision to not require the plaintiff to pay the paper’s attorney fees, as the statute provides.
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From Mike Masnick with Techdirt:
"Mother Jones, the well-known, politically-focused publication, has prevailed in a ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by billionaire Frank VanderSloot. VanderSloot was upset about a 2012 profile that Mother Jones published about him, his multi-level marketing, dietary supplement company Melaleuca, and the millions of dollars he was donating to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. VanderSloot insisted that the article was defamatory, though you’ll have to squint really hard to figure out where and how.
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From Corey Hutchins with Columbia Journalism Review:
"IN A CASE THAT HIGHLIGHTS both a point of potential vulnerability for many news startups and the significance of broad anti-SLAPP statutes, a California judge this week dismissed a lawsuit against inewsource.org, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in San Diego.
In the world of media lawsuits, this one was anything but ordinary. The suit had been brought in April by San Diegans for Open Government, a local nonprofit, and though it took aim at inewsource’s basic operating model, it didn’t go directly after the newsroom’s editorial output.
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