SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) - A student who claims he fell victim to a “vengeful smear campaign” by a spurned ex-girlfriend can sue over emails to Dartmouth College officials that led the prestigious school to rescind his offer of admission.
The student who sent the emails sought to dismiss the case under a California law protecting public participation in matters of general concern, but the First Appellate District Court said the communications involved a matter that was no longer under investigation and were never intended to be public.
The plaintiff, identified only as John Doe, said he was subjected to harassment after he attempted to break up with a student named Nishat Sheikh. Shiekh’s friends then allegedly “embarked upon a conspiracy to ruin plaintiff’s life” by telling other people Doe’s father had moved out of the house from fear of his son, Doe, had told his ex-girlfriend to kill herself and he had an “incredibly manipulative and abusive” nature.
The hardest blow came when another friend of Shiekh’s named Gina Ledor sent emails to Dartmouth saying Doe had hacked into the email accounts of hundreds of students to fake votes for him. The school investigated the matter but because it has a “restorative justice” system nothing was entered into Doe’s transcript, Ledor said.
“I am sharing this with you only so that you are truly aware of whom you have admitted,” she wrote in the June 2020 email to the Dartmouth admissions office. “I believe that there are many others who deserve a spot at your prestigious institution far more than he.”
Doe sued Ledor and her parents and they moved to dismiss the suit under California’s anti-SLAPP law, which allows for the streamlined dismissal of lawsuits based on public participation. A trial judge refused to dismiss the case and the Court of Appeals upheld that decision in a Nov. 30 ruling.
The anti-SLAPP statute protects statements about “an issue under consideration or review,” the court ruled, but Ledor’s emails concerned a matter that had been investigated and resolved the year before. While meddling in a student election may still be a matter of public concern, the court said, the goal of the law is to protect petitioning activity and participation in official proceedings.
Ledor’s emails didn’t contribute to the “public conversation” because nothing in them suggests she wanted them to be public, the court said. They were intended “merely to provide an example for Dartmouth of plaintiff’s lack of good character for Dartmouth’s private purposes only,” the court ruled.
The case was remanded back for trial, where Doe still must prove the emails were defamatory and injured him. The Ledors are represented by Jeremy Friedman, while Doe is represented by the Moya Law Firm.