Naji A. Alkateeb and Deanna R. Wilson-Alkateeb filed a "John Doe" lawsuit in federal district court in New York in May 2005. According to court documents, several anonymous Internet users(using Google and Hushmail email addresses) allegedly postedinsulting comments, threats, and personal information related to theAlkateebs on the forum sections of two websites: TheKnot.com and Photobucket.com. Certain unknown defendants also allegedly sent defamatory emails to third parties, including the plaintiffs' extended family. The Alkateebs sued for defamation, invasion of privacy (through publication of private facts), and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

After filing suit, the Alkateebs subpoeanaed The Knot, Photobucket, Google, and Hushmail for information that would reveal the identities of the anonymous posters. Three anonymous defendants received notice of the subpoena and moved to quash, and Public Citizen filed an amicus brief, in which it argued that the First Amendment protected the defendants' right to speak anonymously. Public Citizen also argued that the plaintiffs had not shown that jurisdiction was proper either in federal court or in New York. Apparently the court allowed some of the subpoenas to issue.

The Alkateebs filed an amended complaint in September 2005, in which they named the Knot, Inc. and four individuals as defendants. On Jan 31, 2006, the Alkateebs filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss the complaint without prejudice. The court granted the motion as to all defendants except the defendants who had already moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. When the plaintiffs did not respond within thirty days to the motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction, the court dismissed the lawsuit against the final three defendants with prejudice.

The Westboro Baptist Church is a fundamentalist Christian church that contends that God kills soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as punishment for America'stolerance of homosexuality and for the presence of gays in the U.S. military. The church operates a number of websites, including www.godhatesfags.com, on which it disseminates its rabidly anti-homosexual views. The church has gained notoriety for staging protests at the funerals of U.S. soldiers in order to draw attention to its message.

Albert Snyder's son, Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, was a U.S. Marinewho was killed on March 3, 2006 during active service in Iraq. His bodywas returned to the United States, and his family held a funeral forhim on March 10, 2006 in Westminster, Maryland.

Westboro Baptist Church pastor and founder Fred Phelps and members of his congregation picketed Matthew's funeral, holding signs expressing anti-gay, anti-American, and anti-Catholic slogans, including "God hates you" and "You're going to hell."

Westboro Baptist Church also posted an essay on its website entitled "The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder." In the essay, statements indicated that Albert and his wife “raised [Matthew] for the devil,” “RIPPED that body apart and taught Matthew to defy his Creator, to divorce, and to commit adultery,” “taught him how to support the largest pedophile machine in the history of the entire world, the Roman Catholic monstrosity,” and “taught Matthew to be an idolator.”

On June 5, 2006, Snyder filed a lawsuit in federal court in Maryland against Westboro Baptist, Fred Phelps, and anonymous members of the church congregation. The complaint included claims for defamation, two counts of invasion of privacy (intrusion on seclusion and publicity given to private life), and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

On September 18, 2006, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the complaint on jurisdictional and substantive grounds. The Court denied the motion on October 30, 2006.

Snyder's amended complaint, filed February 23, 2007, named Phelps's two daughters, Rebekah Phelps-Davis and Shirley Phelps-Roper, as additional defendants. Two months later, Phelps-Davis and Phelps-Roper filed a motion to dismiss and for summary judgment on grounds similar to their father's September 2006 motion. The Court denied this motion in June 2007.

Although the record is not entirely clear, it appears that the defendants renewed their motions for summary judgment, and, on October 15, 2007, the Court granted summary judgment for the defendants on the defamation claim and the invasion of privacy claim based on publication of private facts. The court announced its decision in open court, commenting that “These comments — as extreme as they may be — they are taken in termsof religious expression. This is not the type of language that one is going to assume is meant as a statement of fact.” The decision was memorialized in an October 16, 2007 order.

The jury trail comenced on October 22, 2007 to hear the remaining counts of invasion of privacy (intrusion upon seclusion) and intentional infliction of emotional distress. On October 31, 2007 the jury handed down a $10.9 million verdict against the defendants. This figure is made up of $2.9 million in compensatory damages, $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy, and $2 million in punitive damages for causing emotional distress. After the verdict, Fred Phelps indicated his intent to appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The defendants' practice of protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers is infamous, and Congress passed a federal statute on May 29, 2006 that prohibits protests of the sort involved in this case. The Kansas legislature approved a similar prohibition in April 2007.

Update:

2/4/2008 - Judge Bennett granted in part Defendants' motion for remittitur and cut the jury award down to $5 million, applying both federal constitutional and state common law standards. The courtleft the jury's compensatory damage award of$2.9 million intact but reduced the total punitive damages to $2.1million.

2/11/2008 - Phelps filed statement of intent to appeal.

9/24/2009 - The Fourth Circuit issued an opinion reversing the judgment of the district court and vacating the jury award.  The appellate court found the Phelps' speech (both website and picketing) protected by the First Amendment.

3/02/2011 - The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, held that a suit for intentional infliction of emotional distress must fail  because Phelps' speech was on a matter of public concern.  He held that the context of a funeral did not transform the context of the speech from public to private, because the Westboro Baptist Church picketed on public land.

The Court also addressed liability under the captive audience theory. If Snyder were seen as a captive audience at his son's funeral, he could possibly recover from the harmful effects of the speech because he would be an unwilling listener. However, the Court stressed that the picketers didn't interrupt the funeral, shout profanities, or behave "unruly." Snyder couldn't see any of the signs during the funeral and in fact didn't know what they said until after the funeral was over.

The Court left open whether time, place or manner restrictions restricting picketing at funerals would violate the First Amendment.

Two female Yale Law School students, captioned as Does I & II, sued Anthony Ciolli, the former chief education director of the popular law school admissions forum, AutoAdmit, and a host of pseudonymous users of the forum over vulgar, sexually explicit, and threatening comments posted about them on the forum. In addition to making numerous derogatory and sexually explicit statements about the two students, pseudonymous users of the site created another website, t14talent: The Most Appealing Women @ Top Law Schools (now defunct), and posted photographs of one of the students without her permission. (Although the complaint is not entirely clear on this point, the student claims copyright ownership in these photographs in addition to publicity rights, indicating that she may have been the creator of the photos and posted them online.)

According to the complaint, the two students complained about the forum postings to the AutoAdmit staff, but AutoAdmit did not remove the material. Ciolli disputes that he had any authority to remove the offensive postings.

In June 2007, the two students sued in federal court in Connecticut, asserting claims of defamation, copyright infringement, unauthorized appropriation of name and likeness, unreasonable publicity given to another's life, false light invasion of privacy, and other torts. Soon after filing, they moved to proceed anonymously, and the court granted that request.

In August 2007, the plaintiffs moved to modify the court's scheduling order in order to give them time to investigate the identity of the pseudonymous defendants and to amend their complaint. The court granted the initial request and two subsequent requests for thirty-day extensions, the last of which was requested on October 4. According to a tip posted on David Lat's Above the Law blog, it is unlikely that the court will grant a fourth extension, so an amended complaint may be forthcoming relatively soon.

Update:

11/8/07 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint dropping Ciolli from the lawsuit.

1/24/08 - Plaintiffs filed a motion for expedited discovery seeking to uncover the identities of the pseudonymous posters listed in the complaint.

1/29/08 - Court granted motion for expedited discovery.

2/22/08 - Pseudonymous defendant "AK47" moved to quash the subpoena directed at AT&T requesting information about his identity.

3/2/08 - Plaintiffs deposed former defendant Anthony Ciolli, at which Ciolli acknowledged that his AOL Instant Messenger username is "AnthonyCiolli."

3/4/08 - Former defendant Anthony Ciolli filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the plaintiffs, their lawyers, and other defendants for wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, slander, false light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contract, and unauthorized use of name or likeness.

3/18/08 - Plaintiffs issued a subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" and related information about the account, including "other user names and login IDs and/or Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses associated with the IM username 'AnthonyCiolli.'"

4/7/08 - Ciolli filed a motion to quash the AOL subpoena in federal district court in Virginia.

06/13/08 - The court denied AK47's motion to quash the subpoena seeking his identity from AT&T.

08/05/08 - Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint that names Mathew C. Ryan (previously known by username ":D") as a defendant. Legal Satyricon "can confirm with 100% certainty that the guy in the complaint is neither an attorney nor a law professor."

8/13/08 - Defendant "a horse walks into a bar", a.k.a Ryan Mariner filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the plaintiff's have stated no cause of action against him and that they have failed to prosecute the action against him despite offers to accept service made through counsel. 

9/10/08 - Plaintiffs filed papers in opposition to Mariner's motion to dismiss.

9/19/08 - The United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia held that the plaintiffs' subpoena to AOL seeking the names of "all persons who have registered or used" the username "AnthonyCiolli" was facially invalid because it was issued from the wrong court.  The court determined that it should have issued from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Because the court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction, it did not reach the merits of Anthony Ciolli's motion to quash. 

10/26/08 - Plaintiffs filed a notice of settlement and request for dismissal against defendant "Whamo."

3/31/09 - Pennsylvania federal court largely denied the defendants' motion to dismiss Anthony Ciolli's complaint in Ciolli v. Iravani, but gave defendants leave to renew their motion after jurisdictional discovery.  The court also struck certain allegations from the complaint relating to settlement negotiations in the Connecticut lawsuit. 

4/30/09 - Connecticut federal court denies Matthew Ryan's motion to dismiss. 

5/21/09 - Matthew Ryan files his answer to the second amended complaint in Connecticut federal court.

9/29/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Settlement and Request for Dismissal of Action Against Defendant ":D", A.K.A. Matthew C. Ryan

10/16/09 - Plaintiffs filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal of Action Against Remaining Defendants Without Prejudice by Doe 1, Doe 2

10/23/09 - Court dismissed case

For two weeks in May 2004, Jessica Cutler, a blogger and aide to Ohio Senator Michael DeWine, posted details of her sex life on her blog, The Washingtonienne (now defunct), including her relationship with Robert Steinbuch (using his initials, "RS"), Senator DeWine's counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Cutler's blog posts contained many intimate details about her relationship with RS, including mentioning that their initial date did not include intercourse, but that he "[h]as a great ass" and "likes spanking. (Both giving and receiving.)"  During the next twelve days, Cutler continued to disclose intimate details about their sexual encounters both to her friends and to readers of her blog.

On May 18, 2004, Anna Marie Cox posted a link from her popular Washington gossip blog, Wonkette, to Cutler's blog, which at the time had only a small number of readers. After that, Cutler's blog received widespread attention in the media and blogosphere.  After Cutler became aware of this, she discontinued her blogging activities and shut down the site.

Although Cutler didn't name "RS" on her blog, she posted personal information about him, such as the fact that he was Jewish, was a Senate staff lawyer, had a twin, and owned a home in Bethesda, Maryland.  This information was sufficient for others in the blogosphere to guess that RS was Steinbuch.  In fact, Cutler had blogged about her affairs with six other men as well, including a Georgetown lawyer who paid her $400 for sex, a staffer in Senator Lieberman's office, and the Chief of Staff at a government agency who had been appointed by President Bush.   All of which created a frenzy to identify the men she had blogged about.

In May 2005, Steinbuch sued Cutler in federal court for publication of private facts, false light invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  In his complaint, he wrote that "[n]o reasonable person would want the intimate physical, verbal, emotional, and psychological details of his or her sexual life . . . exposed . . . on the Internet for all the world to read. It is one thing to be manipulated and used by a lover, it is another thing to be cruelly exposed to the world." Steinbuch also contended that some of the information Cutler published was untrue and that her blog presented him in a falase and defamatory light.

In July 2005, Cutler filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that (1) Steinbuch ratified the disclosure of details about their sexual relationship in office discussions (and that her blog was simply an extension of that discussion); (2) Steinbuch had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a 12-day "sexual tryst"; (3) disclosure on a personal blog, without more, is not publicity and is little more than "writing on a bathroom wall"; (4) Steinbuch had waived any privacy expectations by joining in or allowing office gossip about the intimate details of their encounters; and (5) Cutler had a First Amendment right - and that it was newsworthy for her - to share her personal viewpoints about the pressing public issue of "the interplay between sex and power in the Nation's capital."

In his opposition to her motion, Steinbuch rejected Cutler's legal arguments and asserted that she had sought "widespread publication" of the intimate facts of their relationship and "deliberately declined to password-protect her blog, making it publicly available to anybody on the Internet."  He also alleged that Cutler sought publicity for her blog when she hyperlinked her personal blog to Wonkette.

On April 5, 2006, the Court denied Cutler's motion to dismiss without a written opinion.

In October 2006, Steinbuch added Anna Marie Cox as a defendant in his First Amended Complaint.  Cox moved to dismiss on January 26, 2007, arguing, inter alia, that she was immune under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The court dismissed the claims against Cox in May 2007.

Update:

5/30/06 - Steinbuch filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Arkansas (4:06-cv-00620-WRW) against Cutler, Hyperion Books, Disney Publishing Worldwide, HBO, and Time Warner.

6/1/07 - D.C. court stayed the case following Cutler's filing of  Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of New York.