Dziubla v. Piazza, No. D076183 (D4d1 Dec. 29, 2020)
A guy who wanted to expand his gun range into some kind of firearms theme park borrowed some money to do so. That deal soured and ended up in litigation in Nevada. Some associates of Gun Guy—claiming to be private investigators—started creeping around the home of Lender. Gun Guy then published a manifesto, which he put on his website and emailed to his 200,000 gun-loving followers. The manifesto solicited funds to defray Gun Guy’s legal bills said lots of bad stuff about Lenders and their litigation. But it also doxed them—published their home address along with pictures of them and their residence.
Lenders sue in California. Gun Guy files an anti-SLAPP motion to the claims aimed at the manifesto. There’s not a lot of dispute that the manifesto was adequately connected to the Nevada litigation to be “protected activity” under Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16(e)(1). (Lenders also make a Flatley illegality argument. But we know that’s doomed, right?)
So the crux of the issue is the second prong.
To be sure, litigation-adjacent speech that gets you into (e)(1) is also almost always also protected on the merits by the Civil Code § 47(b) litigation privilege. And that’s true for most of the manifesto. For which the motion was properly granted. But not the doxing.
As the Court sees it, “[t]here was simply no good reason to include [Lender’s] home address, images of his house and a close-up picture of his face in a communication aimed at explaining the status of ongoing litigation and soliciting financial support.” Said differently, the doxing lacked a sufficient nexus to the litigation to merit protection under § 47(b). So on remand, the trial court needs to apply the Baral v. Schnitt analysis and excise out the parts of the claim that arise from protected activity, but permit the part of the case based on doxing to proceed.
Affirmed in part.
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