Just this morning we told you that Leah Remini has beefed up her legal team while she prepared for a response from Scientology to her harassment and defamation lawsuit, which was filed in August.
Now, there’s a new filing from the church saying that it does plan to respond to her lawsuit next week in the form of an anti-SLAPP motion that will ask the court to throw out the lawsuit for being unconstitutional.
We know this because Scientology has asked for an emergency hearing tomorrow today to grant it the right to submit a slightly longer response than allowed by the rules because, they say, Leah’s complaint contains so many allegations. They want to submit 30 pages, and Leah’s side wanted them to keep it to 20 pages. So they’re asking the court for permission to submit the longer response.
More importantly, however, Scientology has revealed the approach it’s going to take to her lawsuit, and it’s what we suspected: They are going to say that all the mean things they’ve been saying about Leah on social media are protected by Scientology’s free speech and religious rights granted by the First Amendment.
We thought you’d want to see some of the language from the filing. Again, this is just a teaser, the real response, the anti-SLAPP motion, is coming next week.
This case concerns a more than decade-long campaign by Plaintiff against her former church, the Church of Scientology. Over the past decade, she has made a lucrative career spewing hate and inspiring violence against the Church of Scientology, its parishioners, and the ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion. She has done this through her autobiography, a cable television show, podcasts, and appearances on broadcast television and radio. She has used those platforms to call the Church “pure fucking evil” and its parishioners as “sick assholes,” “fucking like body snatchers,” and “morally depleted,” and even to falsely accuse the ecclesiastical leader of the religion of unidentified “crimes.”
CSI has, and continues to, respond to Plaintiff’s slander in various public fora. On August 29, 2023, Plaintiff filed her FAC [first amended complaint], which seeks to impose liability on Defendants for their responses to Plaintiff’s attacks on them…
The FAC alleges that “[f]or the past ten years,” Defendants have deployed “hundreds of Scientology-controlled and -coordinated social media accounts” to spread “malicious and fraudulent rumors about her.” This supposed ten-year “campaign” against Plaintiff allegedly consists of dozens of individual defamatory statements, such as allegedly calling Plaintiff a “bigot” and a “fraud” whose “words lead to hate and violence.” The FAC alleged Defendants conducted this campaign through “hundreds” of websites ans social media accounts, through over 5,000 separate domains, including, from just one website alone, 131 videos and 61 “blog posts” all supposedly containing defamatory content.
These and other videos cited in the FAC contain interviews with Plaintiff’s family members and other third parties who recount their negative experiences with Plaintiff, such as that she is an abusive employer, is a racist, and reneges on promises to pay for cancer treatments. The FAC asserts that the entirety of this library of material is defamatory. The FAC also asserts that Defendants orchestrated “hundreds” of letters to broadcasters and sponsors to urge them to boycott Plaintiff’s anti-Scientology television show.
Moreover, the FAC alleges that Plaintiff was “surveilled by private investigators (through their lawyers)” – thus, implicating protected pre-litigation petitioning activity as the basis of the claims. The FAC purports to situate the alleged “campaign” against Plaintiff in no less than 70 years of distorted “history” of the Church of Scientology and purported Scientology teachings and doctrine (throughout the FAC).
Religious speech is of course protected, and speech about the Church of Scientology in particular has been recognized as speech on a matter of public interest. See Weinberg v. Feisel, 110 Cal. App. 4th 1122, 1133 (2003) (noting that “statements concerning a lawsuit against a large and wealthy church [the Church of Scientology] that had been the subject of extensive media coverage” and qualified as matter of public interest).
All of which is to say, there is a lot of ground to cover in drafting an anti-SLAPP motion against a complaint that attempts to tortify ten years’ worth of literally thousands of media exchanges between Plaintiff and Defendants, as well as the history of the Church. To give just one example, Plaintiff alleges that Defendants defamed her by allegedly asserting that she inspired threats and acts of violence against the Church, its parishioners, and its leadership. (See, e.g., FAC ¶¶ 123, 149.) As part of satisfying prong 2 of the anti-SLAPP analysis to show that Plaintiff cannot meet her burden of proving her claim, Defendants will provide multiple examples of persons who committed acts of violence against the Church while expressly claiming Plaintiff as their inspiration. But just to counter this single allegation of defamation by demonstrating the truth of Defendants’ statements requires some time – and pages. And when the various allegations of protected speech and conduct are tallied up, Defendants’ anticipated anti-SLAPP motion will seek to strike no less than 114 individual paragraphs of the FAC in addition to entire causes of action.
Given that every single allegedly defamatory statement cited in the FAC, as well as Plaintiff’s allegations relating to pre-litigation petitioning activity and Defendants’ religious practices, implicate protected speech under the anti-SLAPP statute, Defendants are preparing to file an anti-SLAPP Motion addressing Plaintiff’s allegations. For efficiency’s sake, Defendants sought to file a combined brief of 30 pages – rather than filing two separate briefs of 15 pages each and proposed that to Plaintiff’s counsel.
To that end, counsel for CSI sent the following email to Plaintiff’s counsel:
Counsel: we are preparing an anti-SLAPP motion as a responsive pleading to your client’s complaint, to be filed on or before October 25 [sic –response date is October 26]. Rather than have separate motions filed by CSI and RTC, with separate oppositions filed by you, we propose that CSI/RTC file a single motion, but with the allowable pages for moving papers, oppositions, and replies doubled. This would mean that CSI/RTC file a motion of no more than 30 pages, Plaintiff has 30 pages for an opposition, and any reply would be limited to 20 pages. We think this makes more sense and is more efficient than doubling the number of motions, oppositions, and replies. If you agree, we can prepare a stipulation to file with the Court.
Plaintiff’s counsels responded, “We agree that a single motion and a single opposition makes sense,” but they proposed instead that the joint opening brief be limited to 20 pages, Plaintiff’s opposition limited to 20 pages, and Defendants’ reply limited to 10 pages. Counsel for CSI replied that it “was unreasonable to ask us to accept a lower number of total pages than we are entitled to, particularly in light of the hundreds of allegations in the complaint.” Plaintiff’s counsel responded that they would not agree. They claimed in response that CSI and RTC’s issues were “identical” and thus more pages were not warranted. (Id.) This response is not correct – RTC has independent issues it would raise in a combined brief – and it addresses neither the number of allegations made nor that CSI and RTC could separately file briefs totaling thirty pages to address the allegations.
Unable to reach an agreement, Defendants gave notice of this Application at 9:30 a.m. on October 17, 2023.
Given that Defendants are seeking no more total pages than they are entitled to under CRC 3.1113(d), and the extraordinary number of allegations that must be addressed in the lengthy FAC, the request to file a consolidated memorandum of no more than 30 pages is justified under CRC 3.1113(e).
Furthermore, to the extent Plaintiff seeks to limit Defendants’ total briefing to 20 pages, that clearly is impermissible and would cause Defendants irreparable harm in depriving them of their right to fully address the voluminous allegations against them. As stated above, counsel for Defendants are willing to provide a confidential draft of the memorandum to the Court for in camera review.
So, because the two sides couldn’t agree on how many pages Scientology should submit in their anti-SLAPP, we got a brief sneak peek of it a week early. Thank you, Leah!
Now, can Scientology get away with using a law, the anti-SLAPP, that was designed to protect small protesters from big, deep-pocketed bullies? We’ve pointed out in the past how ironic (and disgusting) it is that Scientology uses the anti-SLAPP strategy in order pretend that they’re the little guy being abused by the big bully (in this case, Leah and her lawsuit).
Will this court fall for it?
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"Over the past decade, she has made a lucrative career spewing hate and inspiring violence against the Church of Scientology, its parishioners, and the ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion."
"For decades, she had made a career of lucrative donations to our legal funds so we could spew hate and inspire violence against the enemies of the Church of Scientology, its parishioners, and the ecclesiastical leader of the Scientology religion." -- There, fixed it for you.
Sigh. That old saw? Yep here’s the deal: anti SLAPP was created specifically for scientology type litigation. That is exactly how they litigate. It blows my mind when they accuse the other party of stealing their tactics.
A brief primer on SLAPP
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.
In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. In some cases, repeated frivolous litigation against a defendant may raise the cost of directors and officers liability insurance for that party, interfering with an organization's ability to operate.
That’s almost religious doctrine for scientology in a suit.