Defamation plaintiffs rejoice! The California Supreme Court recently issued a ruling in a speech case, FilmOn.com v. DoubleVerify, 2019 Cal. LEXIS 3042, 2019 WL 1984290, that curtails the until now seemingly ever-expanding notion of whether speech “is in connection with” a matter of public interest and therefore falls within the ambit of the widely abused anti-SLAPP statute. Never before had a California court articulated a formula for determining whether something “is in connection with” a matter of public interest. Courts must now determine whether a statement, even if the content touches on a general area of public interest, contributes to or furthers the public conversation on that issue of public interest.

California’s anti-SLAPP statute provides an early special motion to strike meritless claims arising from acts in furtherance of a person’s “exercise of a constitutional right of petition or the constitutional right of free speech in connection with a public issue or an issue of public interest,” see Cal. Civ. Proc. Section 425.16(e)(4). The anti-SLAPP law was enacted “to protect nonprofit corporations and common citizens ‘from large corporate entities and trade associations’ in petitioning government,” as in USA Waste of California v. City of Irwindale, 184 Cal.App.4th 53, 66 (2010). In other words, the law was meant to protect against defamation claims by well-funded organizations against ordinary citizens who exercised their rights to petition and free speech. For example, the anti-SLAPP statute was intended to deter wealthy developers from dragging homeowners who oppose their proposed projects into court with bogus defamation lawsuits for the purpose of chilling their free speech and breaking them financially.

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