Vanginderen v. Cornell [1]

Kevin Vanginderen, a Cornell graduate, sued Cornell University seeking $1 million in damages for libel and publication of private facts after Cornell made available online an 1983 issue of the Cornell Chronicle newspaper that reported that Vanginderen had been charged for third degree burglary in connection with incidents on the Cornell campus.

Vanginderen sued in California state court, but Cornell removed [2] the case to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Cornell then moved to strike [3] Vanginderen's complaint under California's anti-SLAPP statute [4], arguing that Cornell's posting of the 24-year-old article was an act of protected free speech, and Vanginderen could not show a likelihood of success on his defamation claim because the article was true and based on information from publicly available court records.  Further, Cornell argued that Vanginderen could not prove his pubication of private facts claim because the article was a matter of legitimate public concern.  

The court agreed with Cornell's arguments and granted [5] its motion.  The court ruled that because the records of the underlying case were publicly available and the article dealt with a matter of legitimate public concern, Cornell was entitled to make the anti-SLAPP motion. It further held that Vanginderen could not succeed on the merits of his defamation and publication of private facts claims because the story was substantially true and newsworthy. The court did not reach Cornell's argument that the statute of limitations barred Vanginderen's lawsuit, an argument which raised the interesting question of whether digitizing the original print article and publishing it online re-published the article for purposes of the statute of limitations.

Vanginderen has appealed the ruling. Cornell filed a motion for an award of attorney's fees in July 2008, which is currently pending.

While Cornell's motion to strike was pending, Vanginderen filed a second lawsuit against Cornell in California state court, also naming Cornell's lawyer Bert Deixler as a defendant. In the second lawsuit, Vanginderen alleges that Cornell and Deixler defamed him and portrayed him in a false light by filing records of Cornell's original campus police investigation as exhibits to its motion to strike in the first case. Cornell removed the second lawsuit to federal court (docket no. 3:08-cv-00736), where the same judge is handling the case. Cornell and Deixler filed motions to strike the complaint in the second lawsuit under California's anti-SLAPP statute in June 2008.