In September, posts made by two Facebook accounts suggested that McLaughlin was having an affair with a coworker and that her “untrustworthy” behavior could lead fellow Beachwood officers to “need … mental health counseling.”
Along with a handful of Facebook posts, McLaughlin’s complaint cited emails from a MissMarples21@proton.me account. Those, the city claimed, matched the language and punctuation of the fake Facebook accounts.
In one email sent to McLaughlin, the Mayor of Beachwood, city council, an editor for the Cleveland Jewish News and a staff member of the Fraternal Order of Police, MissMarples21 said they should “quit blindly letting [McLaughlin’s actions] to continue to get worse. Stop giving people easy reasons to sue Beachwood. Stop giving reasons for the city to look idiotic.” They said she was the cause of officers quitting, and that she had retaliated against one in particular.
The judge said all of it was protected speech.
“Opining that the police officers employed in the City of Beachwood will need future mental health treatment, implying that [McLaughlin] would terminate a hypothetical person who drafted a grant proposal, and supposing about [McLaughlin’s] prenuptial agreement do not contain the type of verifiable facts… to constitute actionable defamation,” Santoli’s decision read.
Andrew Geronimo, director of First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, which filed motions in the case on behalf of one of the accounts, told Scene it’s possible that McLaughlin cried defamation in order to strong-arm her alleged defamer into showing his or her face. One who might’ve been a disgruntled coworker, maybe even a fellow officer.
“Dangers to free speech are often filled with the hope that whomever the anonymous commenter is, will be too scared,” he said. But “that anonymous right to speech, as the court said, is at the bedrock of our constitutional rights.”
Indeed, ruling that the Facebook comments were of the “hyperbolic, provocative and often-crass style” brand of anonymous internet discourse and that the email, being directed to public officials, was simply alerting them to issues, Santoli wrote: “This court recognizes the potential for defamation plaintiffs to file retaliatory lawsuits simply to obtain the identities of their critics and, with that knowledge, effectively silence any further commentary or criticism from that individual. When a public official — or in this case, a chief of police — obtains the identity of an anonymous critic, she obtains a very powerful form of relief.”
Kennedy Dickson, a law student in the Clinic who worked on the case, said the McLaughlin decision could be cited in courtrooms across the state in the future, as defamation’s definition evolves in the decade.
This “is the type of meaningful work I wanted to accomplish in law school,” she wrote in an email Friday. “The court’s decision is an excellent result for our client. I hope it will be the first of many Ohio court decisions affording similar safeguards for exercising constitutionally protected speech.”
In a statement, Beachwood mayor Justin Berns said: “We are disappointed that the harassing behavior directed toward the leadership in our police department has been met with no consequence. Nevertheless, we will continue to support all of our employees and do everything possible to maintain a healthy, safe work environment.”
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This article appears in Apr 19 – May 3, 2023.