Motion to strike pleading in Federal court based on state statute requiring an elevated pleading for defamation cases is not valid, as it conflicts with FRCP pleading and summary judgement rules. As the statute awards fees only for its own process, dismissal under the Federal pleading rules does not automatically justify an award of fees.
Deft is not shielded by the CDA for independently authored social media posts that include information available elsewhere on social media. Sole authorship of the post in question is sufficient material contribution to establish the poster as the sole information source for the purposes of a defamation claim.
Testifying at public meetings in addition to a lot of other public speech is insufficient to establish a person as a limited purpose public figure, since the designation was created to recognize that some figures had sufficient media clout to respond to attacks on their own.
A juxtaposition of an image of the plaintiff with an image of racist conduct was sufficiently clear, both in itself and within the frame of general knowledge, to establish libel per se by implication.