Dubac v. Itkoff, No. B317061 (D2d8 Apr. 19, 2024)
This is an ugly beef between neighbors who dislike each other. A lot. Over a several month period in 2020, two of the neighbors (a husband and wife couple) sent a number of emails impugning the character of the other neighbor. They called him racist, accused him of accosting various women, called him a liar, and accused him of various and sundry misconduct connected to his role as a member of the board of the HOA of a six-unit condo building they all live in.
Neighbor B sued Neighbors A for defamation and other torts along that line. Neighbors A respond with an anti-SLAPP motion, which the trial court mostly denied. Neighbors A appeal. The rub of the appeal is that, for the statements at issue to be “protected activity” under the anti-SLAPP statute, Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16, they need to have been made in connection with a “public issue” or an “issue of public interest.”
Here, they weren’t. They were made on small fora, where the general audience was the other homeowners in the condo. Even the statements that weren’t just personal attacks—like the claims about mismanaging the condo board—were not matters of public interest such that large numbers of people would care about them.
The Court does a useful canvass of “name-calling” cases in the anti-SLAPP contexts, confirming that essentially private disputes are not the stuff of anti-SLAPP protection. As the court puts it:
The general public did not and could not know about this intra-building tiff. The audience was always tiny. It was never the ‘public.’
Affirmed.