Pro-Palestinian Poster's "Doxing" Claim, Stemming from Her Firing as a Result of Public Criticism, Rejected

Some excerpts from Judge Jacqueline Becerra (S.D. Fla.) today in Khorashi v. Beer; the analysis strikes me as correct:

This is a state-law tort action arising out of an online “doxing” incident that preceded Plaintiff’s termination from her prior employer, Chartwell Law Offices LLP (“Chartwell”). Defendant Gadi Beer helped launch Chartwell in 2002 and served in senior leadership roles before leaving the firm in early 2023. Plaintiff alleges, upon information and belief, that he retained an equity interest in the firm and remained in regular contact with its founding partners. Defendant Beth Beer, Gadi Beer’s wife, is a licensed attorney who served as a Regional Director in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights during the relevant period.

Plaintiff, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, was employed as an associate attorney in Chartwell’s Miami office from 2018 until her termination on February 29, 2024. Throughout her employment, Plaintiff maintained a public Instagram account, “thatlawyermomlife,” using her real name and the same profile picture that appeared on Chartwell’s website, but her Instagram page did not include any reference to Chartwell or her place of employment.

After the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Plaintiff began posting prolifically in support of the Palestinian cause. She alleges she was “well-aware” that her posts “could be misconstrued by some people as antisemitism” and therefore consciously avoided negative references to Jews or Judaism, directing her criticism instead at Israel’s government, the IDF, and Zionism. Her account was known to coworkers, some of whom followed and engaged with her content.

Beginning in late November 2023, Plaintiff alleges that an account using the handle “Beth Margot” attacked nearly every one of her posts about Gaza. The comments became “increasingly obsessive, vile and hateful,” so Plaintiff blocked the account. Plaintiff later determined that “Beth Margot” was a pseudonym used by Defendant Beth Beer.

On January 11, 2024, the firm’s two founding partners, General Counsel, and HR Director met with Plaintiff, telling her that the firm had been monitoring her posts after unidentified individuals expressed “concerns” that some could be perceived as antisemitic. In this meeting, Plaintiff was counseled to be “mindful” and “positive” going forward. During a second meeting about eight days later, firm leadership raised similar concerns. Plaintiff contends, however, that at no time was she told any post violated firm policy, asked to remove any post, or directed to stop posting entirely. Plaintiff also notes she posted more than fifty additional times between January 19 and February 29, 2024, but “Chartwell did not find issues with her content during that time frame.”

On February 18, 2024, Plaintiff was “doxed” on an Instagram page called “Jew Hate Database” (“Jewhatedb”), which Plaintiff alleges is operated by the organization StopAntisemitism.org. The Jewhatedb Instagram post displayed an altered version of one of Plaintiff’s Instagram posts: the page claimed to have “fixed it” by crossing out the pronoun “they” and substituting the word “Jews.” The image did not state Plaintiff’s name or employer, but it displayed her Instagram account handle, on which Plaintiff’s real name was disclosed. The post generated dozens of hostile comments, speculation about where she worked, and demands that her employer fire her.

Plaintiff alleges, upon information and belief, that Defendants “conspired to submit Plaintiff’s Instagram post to the Jewhatedb Instagram page and had advance notice” of the February 18 post, and that their “simultaneous appearances in the comments section … immediately following the posting” on Jewhatedb served “the sole and improper purpose of providing the critical missing information that was required to launch the doxing attack: Plaintiff’s real name and a link to her firm profile.” As to the comments themselves, Plaintiff alleges the following sequence:

1. A commenter urged others to “find out who this person is and have her fired … she’s a lawyer, should be easy to find her.”
2. Defendant Beth Beer, posting as “Beth Margot,” responded that Plaintiff “works at Chartwell Law Offices” and posted a link to Plaintiff’s firm profile, which included her work email, telephone number, and the Miami office’s contact information.
3. She also commented: “I wonder how her Jewish clients would feel about her public posts. This one is innocuous compared to her regular posts. It’s disgraceful.”
4. Defendant Gadi Beer reposted the link to Chartwell Law that “Beth Margot” had originally posted.

Plaintiff alleges the reference to her Jewish clients rested on “non-public and highly confidential information … that only [Beth Beer] and her husband possessed.” After another commenter stated he “[f]ound her in a second” using the link, Gadi Beer re-posted the same link to Plaintiff’s Chartwell profile.

Ten days later, on February 28, 2024, Plaintiff was doxed a second time by StopAntisemitism.org’s X account, which has more than 237,000 followers and which identified Plaintiff by name and by her position at Chartwell. That afternoon, Plaintiff received dozens of threatening emails, voicemails, and calls at work, and Chartwell began receiving “an overwhelming number” of communications demanding her termination.

The next morning, February 29, 2024, one of the firm’s founding partners, its General Counsel, and its HR Manager informed Plaintiff she was being terminated “because the doxing incident on February 28 had resulted in widespread criticism and hostility towards Chartwell Law on its own social media pages,” had damaged the firm’s reputation and client relationships, and had made some Jewish employees fearful of working with her. Plaintiff alleges that Chartwell “itself referred to” the February 28 doxing incident as “the climactic triggering event” that resulted in her termination. The Amended Complaint does not allege that Defendants authored, contributed to, or had advance knowledge of the February 28 StopAntisemitism.org post, nor that Chartwell viewed Defendants’ February 18 comments…

The court rejected plaintiff’s tortious interference with a business relationship claim:

Under Florida law, a claim for tortious interference with a business relationship requires: (1) the existence of a business relationship under which the plaintiff has legal rights; (2) the defendant’s knowledge of the relationship; (3) an intentional and unjustified interference with the relationship by the defendant; and (4) damage to the plaintiff as a result of the breach of the relationship…. [But t]he Second Restatement of Torts [which] { “… seems to reflect the law of Florida”} states:

One who intentionally causes a third person not to perform a contract or not to enter into a prospective contractual relation with another does not improperly interfere with the other’s contractual relation, by giving the third person (a) truthful information …

The Eleventh Circuit recognized this principle in Worldwide Primates, Inc. v. McGreal (11th Cir. 1994). In Worldwide Primates, the defendant obtained government inspection reports documenting the plaintiff’s treatment of its animals, excerpted their most damaging portions, and mailed them to the plaintiff’s prospective business partner with a cover letter designed to end the relationship…. The Worldwide Primates court reasoned that the plaintiff “could establish no cause of action for interference with its business relationship … when all [the defendant] did was give [the recipient] truthful information.” In so doing, the Court relied upon § 772 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, as well as the comment to it, which states that:

There is of course no liability for interference with a contract or with a prospective contractual relation on the part of one who merely gives truthful information to another. The interference in this instance is clearly not improper. This is true even though the facts are marshaled in such a way that they speak for themselves and the person to whom the information is given immediately recognizes them as a reason for breaking his contract or refusing to deal with another….

Notably, Worldwide Primates demonstrates that truthful information is non-actionable interference regardless of motive. In Worldwide Primates, the activist’s letters were expressly designed to end the plaintiff’s business relationship, yet the Eleventh Circuit still held that the plaintiff’s tortious interference claim had no basis in law because the information was truthful….

The court also rejected plaintiff’s “defamation by implication” claim:

Plaintiff alleges that Defendant Beth Beer defamed Plaintiff by implication when she commented on the February 18 Jewhatedb post: “I wonder how her Jewish clients would feel about her public posts. This one is innocuous compared to her regular posts. It’s disgraceful.” Plaintiff alleges that, in context, the comment falsely implied that she is “a virulent and irredeemable antisemite” unfit to represent Jewish clients. …

[But such an implication] is a subjective characterization of her publicly available posts [and thus a nonactionable opinion], not a verifiable assertion of fact. “Whether an accusation of bigotry is actionable depends on whether the statement appeared to be supported by reasonably specific facts that are capable of objective proof of truth or falsity.” That is not the case here.

Plaintiff alleges that her posts are criticisms of Israel’s government rather than its people, while Defendant Beth Beer allegedly reads them to mean she is an “antisemite.” Yet, neither reading of the same public posts can be proven true or false because it is a subjective assessment and thus, an opinion….

And the court rejected plaintiff’s civil conspiracy claim:

[C]ivil conspiracy is not an independent tort and thus requires an underlying actionable wrong [which the court held was absent here, for the reasons given above -EV] …. Florida recognizes a narrow exception [to that principle] and allows civil conspiracy to be an independent tort where the plaintiff can show a “peculiar power of coercion” possessed by the conspirators by virtue of their combining forces; importantly, this must be a power that no individual acting alone would possess…. Although Plaintiff alleges that Defendants possessed a peculiar power of coercion, thereby relieving her of the underlying tort requirement, other allegations of the Amended Complaint contradict this assertion.

Plaintiff affirmatively alleges that “there was a possibility that the commentators calling for Plaintiff’s termination would eventually discover the information themselves,” given that Plaintiff’s real name appeared on her public Instagram page. Plaintiff also alleges that a commentator “exclaimed that he ‘Found [Plaintiff] in a second’ with the link provided,” which demonstrates that Defendants could have carried out the act alone, possessing the same power together as they would have separately.

While Plaintiff alleges that Defendants “utilized” the Jewhatedb and StopAntisemitism.org platforms “to publicly expose Plaintiff as an alleged Jew hater and antisemite … and ultimately interfere with her employment relationship with Chartwell Law,” the Amended Complaint is devoid of facts showing that Defendants submitted Plaintiff’s Instagram post to either platform. Plaintiff merely alleges “[u]pon information and belief” that Defendants “conspired to submit Plaintiff’s Instagram post to the Jewhatedb Instagram page ….”

Even if the Jewhatedb Instagram post interfered with Plaintiff’s employment—Plaintiff does not allege that it did—this allegation is insufficient to survive a motion to dismiss…. The only fact Plaintiff alleges is that each Defendant commented on the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post. However, Plaintiff alleges that Chartwell terminated her because of the StopAntisemitism.org doxing incident on February 28—not the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post. As such, Defendants’ February 18 comments do not support the inference that they possessed a peculiar power of coercion by combining forces with each other or with Jewhatedb to achieve Plaintiff’s termination. Further, Defendants’ actions in commenting on the February 18 Jewhatedb Instagram post alone cannot give rise to a reasonable inference of “coercion through numbers or economic influence” lest every person who comments on a public Instagram post automatically becomes a co-conspirator. It bears repeating that “peculiar power of coercion” is a “narrow exception.” …

David Andrew Hayes and Kenneth George Turkel (Turkel Cuva Barrios), Jaclyn Sara Clark (The Lawfare Project), and Marc Randazza (Randazza Legal Group, PLLC) represent defendants.

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