Garrido v. Krasnansky [1]

Maria Garrido and William Krasnansky are spouses involved in divorce proceedings before a Vermont family court. Mr. Krasnansky wrote a "thinly-disguised, fictionalized account" of the end of their marriage on his blog, LookAtMyPugs's Jurnull [2]. On the blog, Krasnansky also published excerpts from Garrido's diary that he had found after she moved out of their home. On December 7, 2007, Garrido filed a motion for immediate relief before the family court judge, and the court ordered Krasnansky to take down "any and all Internet postings" about his wife and their marriage pending a hearing scheduled for the following month.

Krasnansky then filed a motion to "dismiss" Garrido's motion for relief and to vacate the December 7 order, primarily on grounds that it was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech. On January 14, 2008, the court vacated its previous order, holding that Krasnansky's blog did not constitute harassment and that the previous order had violated his First Amendment rights. The court also held that it did not have jurisdiction to decide whether any statements on the blog were defamatory. The court indicated, however, that it could bar Krasnansky's unauthorized use of Garrido's diary because it was property (intellectual and tangible) under the jurisdiction of the court, although it acknowledged that it lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to hear a federal copyright claim.

In a related incident, Garrido's lawyer sent a C&D to Derek Bambauer, a legal blogger who had written about the case. (See the CMLP database entry, Garrido v. Bambauer [3], for details.)