Sorry, Rabbi, Your Second Attempt To Uncover Anonymous Critics Rejected Too

from the what-does-the-torah-say-about-harassing-your-critics? dept

A few months back, we wrote about Rabbi Mordechai Tendler, who had tried, five or so years ago, to identify some anonymous bloggers, who had criticized what they felt were inappropriate sexual relationships with his congregants. That attempt had failed under California's anti-SLAPP laws that are useful in protecting anonymous speech. Why this came up again earlier this year was because Tendler apparently wanted to take a second shot at identifying the same bloggers. He did this by filing a different lawsuit about a contractual dispute, and using that lawsuit to subpoena Google to try (again) to identify the bloggers he had been denied learning about years ago. Public Citizen stepped in to question this, and the court has quashed the subpoena -- and did so in a very broad (and useful) manner.

As Paul Levy from Public Citizen notes in his blog post (linked above), his filing had provided a number of "procedural" reasons to reject the subpoena, but NY Supreme Court Justice Victor Alfieri chose the broadest one, saying that the revealing of the anonymous speakers needs to "go to the heart of the case." Since the commentary by these bloggers really only impacted the amount of damages, but wasn't central to the key legal questions in the case, the court rejected the attempt to identify the bloggers.

Plaintiff contends that the information sought is relevant to his mitigation of damages defense. However, mere relevance is not sufficient. Rather, the information sought must "go to the heart of the matter," i.e., that the information is crucial to the party's case.

Since that was not true in this case, the anonymity remains reasonably protected... and Tendler has to deal with another bit of news about the original accusations.

Filed Under: anonymity, free speech, mordechai tendler