How intimidating are intimidation lawsuits (redux)?

For every SLAPP, there must be a SLAPP-back

By Will Collette

Political life in Charlestown will almost certainly tense up as we go into an election year. I predict we will see a lot more threats of public figures wanting to sue people who say things they don’t like, especially now that Jim Mageau has emerged from his cave in preparation to mounting his rumored take-over of town government.

Since Roman times, politicians have tried to bully citizens into silence with the threat of lawsuits. Usually, these threats are simply that – threats. Politicians know the chances of actually winning such suits is slim (especially if what is being said is true, well documented and absence of malice).

Plus courts grant citizens wide latitude to criticize public figures under the “fair comment” doctrine.

But every now and then, a political figure will actually file such a suit to stop citizens from speaking about them in the public arena. These types of  lawsuits were given the name SLAPPs (“Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation”) by University of Colorado scholars George Pring and Penelope Canaan in the 1980s. They invariably involve efforts to use punitive litigation to stifle free speech expression on public issues.

My favorite case was that of Irene Mansfield, a handicapped housewife in Pearland, Texas, whose trailer home was perched near the edge of an unlicensed landfill. She and her neighbors were fighting to stop the landfill owner from expanding the facility. She committed the grievous offense of calling the unlicensed landfill a “dump,” for which she was sued for $5 million. Her husband was also sued in a separate action, also for $5 million, for “failing to control his wife.”

At around the same time, Ann Williams, an elderly retired school teacher in Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana was also sued for roughly the same offense – calling a dump a dump.

I worked with both Irene and Ann to use what was at the time the best defense – a public counter-attack that casts the SLAPPer as the villain who was, in both cases, trying to SLAPP a couple of well-meaning, church-going elderly ladies into silence. I managed to get ABC’s 20-20 news magazine to do a 20-minute segment on the two of them.

To make a long story short, this strategy worked out for both of them. The SLAPP suits were dismissed and they won their fights against the dumpers. Both of them are gone now, but they both lived to be publicly honored by fellow environmentalists for their heroism.

Since that massive flare-up of SLAPP suits in the 1980s, many states have enacted anti-SLAPP and SLAPP-back legislation. Rhode Island is one of them. Rhode Island’s law not only provides you with protections against intimidating lawsuits, but also provides for “SLAPP-back” where you can turn the tables and win compensation and punitive damages against the SLAPPer.

But will a good state law protect you from being sued? The answer I’m afraid is “no.” In the United States of America, anybody can sue anybody for anything. 

And some people, Jim Mageau being a good example, like to drop threats of lawsuits at the slightest provocation. Just because the odds of winning are slim and the chances of serious consequences are real doesn’t mean a litigation-minded person won’t sue.

A litigation-minded person might file a SLAPP suit charging libel, slander, tortious interference, breach of contract, trade secrets, etc. When their purpose is to intimidate opponents into silence, it really doesn’t matter a lot whether the suit is a winner. SLAPPers know the average person is scared to death about being sued and many feel they can’t afford a lawyer to defend themselves. So they fold.

But I remember my many conversations with Irene Mansfield and Ann Williams. They would tell me they would rather die than give into intimidation. Their experience, and that of many other people on the receiving end of SLAPP suits, offers an encouraging lesson. When you weather the initial terrible dread you feel when you’re served with the papers, and stand up and SLAPP-back – both publicly and in the courts – it’s the SLAPPer who has good cause to be afraid.