The Way Way Back

Rand Resources, LLC v. City of Carson, No. S235735 (Cal. Feb. 4, 2019).

Somehow I managed to miss this Supreme Court anti-SLAPP decision from the beginning of the year. I covered the Court of Appeal decision, and then mentioned the Supreme Court decision in in my post on the Eddie Money case. But I just forgot to write it up.

Anyway, the decision mostly presages the Supreme Court’s decisions in Wilson and FilmOn, and I’m mostly only going back to it for completeness/using this as a research tool purposes. It’s not news.

The dispute is over an alleged conspiracy to replace the company designated to be the City of Carson’s exclusive agent in recruiting a football team to move to Carson. There’s basically three groups of claims. 

The first bucket of claims allege that the City lied about breaching its contract with the Original Agent (the plaintiff) and steered the business to New Agent. There are supposedly some secret emails between various City officials and New Agent, as well as some lies City officials told to Original Agent. While these statements form the basis of the claims, per Park, they nonetheless fell outside of the anti-SLAPP statute because: (1) they were too attenuated to any public decision to be in connection with an official proceeding under Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16(e)(2); and (2) although Original Agent argued that the statements were related to bringing a football team to Carson, they more specifically related to who the city should use as an agent to carry out that goal. 

While bringing football to Carson might be an issue of public interest to bring the case under § 425.16(e)(4), who gets to be the agent isn’t. Here—somewhat previewing his opinion in FilmOn—Justice Cuellar makes clear that the focus of the public interest inquiry should be the actual speech at hand, not some general topic that it might tangentially relate to. And while it is theoretically possible that the agent selection issue could be a public issue, the City didn’t come forward with any evidence to show that to be the case. 

The second group concerns a claim for promissory fraud. Here, there is a Park problem. The actual fraudulent statement—something about renewing the Original Agent’s contract—is not protected activity. Although the claim alleges some other more arguably protected statements that Original Agent contends show bad intent, the fraud claim does not arise from those statements. They are just evidence.

The third bucket of claims, however, are different. They are claims against New Agent for interfering with Original Agent’s contract with the City. The interference took two forms. First, New Agent lobbied the City not to renew Original Agent’s contract and to hire New Agent instead. Second, New Agent communicated with the NFL in efforts to convince it to relocate a team in Carson. The Court holds that first type of statements are covered by (e)(2), since they were communications meant to influence and official decisions. The the second were covered by (e)(4) since, unlike the selection of the agent, the issue of bringing a football team to Carson was and public interest issue. 

Court of Appeal reversed in part.