Today a coalition of advocacy groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Southern California, the Sierra Club, the Civil Liberties Defense Center, Greenpeace, Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, the Partnership for Civil Justice, Portland Rising Tide, Amazon Watch, the Center for International Environmental Law, and the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, asked the California Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that endangers protest rights throughout Southern California.
My office represents an immigrant family who lost their house to foreclosure after the financial crisis. Wedgewood—the nation’s largest “fix and flip” operation—bought it. When the family regained employment and tried to buy it back, Wedgewood first led them on and then ignored them.
The family enlisted the help of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action (ACCE)—one of the state’s largest housing rights organizations. Neighbors came to the family’s aid, holding protests in the front yard. La Opinón—the country’s largest Spanish-language newspaper—twice covered the family’s efforts to keep their home. Huffington Post covered it, too.
But Wedgewood moved forward with the eviction. The night the family was evicted, together with ACCE, they picketed outside Wedgewood CEO Greg Geiser’s $3M Manhattan Beach house. About thirty people attended. They sang songs, gave speeches, and chanted. The whole thing lasted an hour. Police observed and didn’t even issue a warning or a single instruction to the protesters.
Two days later, CEO Geiser sued the family and ACCE’s Los Angeles director Peter Kuhns, asking the court prevent the family and ACCE from protesting outside his office or home. Geiser was, of course, represented by a big Century City law firm.
Geiser also wrote to the dean of Occidental College, trying to get the author of the Huffington Post piece fired or reprimanded, in an effort to intimidate him into taking the piece down. Thankfully neither the college nor author was intimidated.
After my office filed anti-SLAPP motions asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit for being retribution over protected First Amendment activity, Geiser said he wanted to talk settlement. He said he would sell the house back to the family for something they can afford. But in exchange, the family, the organizer, and ACCE would have to agree to never disparage him or his company. Not just in relation to this dispute, but ever, over anything. Essentially, Geiser sought to insulate himself and his company from any criticism by one of the state’s largest housing rights organizations and held the family’s home hostage in the process.
The family balked and Geiser away from settlement, dismissed the suit in a fit of spite, and before serving the dismissals, Wedgewood issued a press release about the dispute and the settlement breakdown to get in front of the story in the media.
A spokesman for Wedgewood also published this hit piece on ACCE and the family in the alt-right Breitbart News, trying to tie them to voter fraud, tax increases, “the early release of criminals,” and (the irony!) “millionaires and hedge-fund managers.”
Despite the media attention and dozens of people participating in the protest, the court denied the anti-SLAPP motions saying there was no connection to an issue of public interest. According to the court, all the media attention and other protesters focused on a “purely private” dispute.
After the Court of Appeals affirmed in a 2-1 decision, the California Supreme Court directed the lower court to reconsider the result. The Court of Appeals reissued essentially the same opinion, again splitting 2-1.
We are now asking the Supreme Court to hear this case and uphold the robust protections that the anti-SLAPP statute should provide. Today the diverse coalition of advocacy groups joined that request.
As the coalition states that this case “is a textbook example of a ‘SLAPP’ case, wherein a housing speculator sued a pair of homeowners and a grassroots activist for engaging in public protest of plaintiff’s foreclosure and eviction practices.” And they note the dangers that the lower court’s ruling presents to media who cover protests: “If speech about an issue can be correctly dismissed as purely personal based on a court’s assessment of the motivations of the speaker and evaluation of whether the content ‘address[es] any societal issues,’ then narrative coverage of protests like the ones at issue here might well also not be covered by the protections of the anti-SLAPP statute. Like activists, press are trained to adhere to basic storytelling and persuasive-speech principles, first among them ‘show, don’t tell’: the principle that one must illustrate the general with the particular. It is not clear why a sympathetic blog posting, describing these protests without drawing out obvious connections to the ‘societal issues of residential displacement, gentrification, or the root causes of the great recession, would not now fall outside the protection of the anti-SLAPP statute. That cannot be the outcome the legislature intended.”