Monday, November 24, 2025
Page 1
Court of Appeal:
Judge Erred in Allowing Plaintiffs to Sue as ‘Doe’ and ‘Roe’
Opinion Says Parties Seeking Anonymity Must Make Showing That Public’s Right to Know Is Outweighed
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Adult plaintiffs in an action for defamation based on allegations of sexual misconduct were wrongly granted permission by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to proceed pseudonymously, the Court of Appeal for this district held yesterday, declaring that “[t]he public has a fundamental interest in knowing the identities of parties to litigation in public fora.”
Justice Anne Richardson of Div. Two explained:
“Such information is essential to monitoring public proceedings for a host of evils, including corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, prejudice, and favoritism.”
Permission to use false names in litigation, she said, should be granted only under compelling circumstances.
The decision reverses an order by Judge Frank Tavelman permitting the plaintiffs to be identified as “Jane Roe” and “John Doe.” The defendants were fictitiously named “Jenna Smith” and “Mother Smith.”
Tavelman concluded that the plaintiffs’ privacy interests in having their identities shielded outweigh the public’s interest in knowing who they are, observing that the allegations against the plaintiffs, made online and orally, were “highly sensitive and personal.” He said the plaintiffs’ “fear that future employers, among others, may discover the allegations” if their true names were used in the litigation was “well founded.”
Richardson’s Opinion
Richardson wrote:
“We agree the allegations in the complaint pertain to highly sensitive and private matters: specifically, John’s allegations he was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct while in high school; and Jane’s allegations she was wrongly identified as a nonconsensual partner of John’s during that time. Allegations concerning sexual conduct do fall into the category of highly sensitive and private matters, the more so because the parties were minors at the time.
“But that is merely the first step in the overriding interest test. Next, the court must find that the interest of privacy in highly personal and sensitive matters overcomes the public’s right of access. We conclude there is insufficient evidence to support the trial court’s conclusion that it did.”
There was no evidence, she said, that severe harm would befall the plaintiffs were their identities to be disclosed. Richardson wrote that “conclusory allegations, such as were stated here, are insufficient to support an overriding interest to protect plaintiffs from harm.”
She quoted the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as saying in its 1997 opinion in Doe v. Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wisconsin:
“Identifying the parties to the proceeding is an important dimension of publicness. The people have a right to know who is using their courts.”
Hathaway’s Argument
Representing the plaintiffs, Mark M. Hathaway of the law firm Hathaway & Parker argued in the respondent’s brief:
“A paramount privacy interest of the students—and minor students at that—not to be publicly identified with sexual misconduct and sexual assault, or making untrue statements about sexual assault, warrants the use of pseudonyms in this case.”
Richardson responded that the plaintiffs “were not minors at the time they filed this lawsuit,” remarking:
“While they were minors for a portion of the underlying events, they are not anymore. Thus, allowing a pseudonym here would not protect any minors, which is an interest distinct from protecting private or sensitive information.”
Names Publicly Revealed
The defendant identified as “Jenna Smith” had made disparaging allegations about the plaintiffs on social media. Richardson wrote:
“Since the allegedly defamatory comments were already on the Internet, they were in the public record. Moreover, parties generally lose their reasonable expectations of privacy when they file a civil lawsuit.”
She commented:
“[T]here is no basis to proceed anonymously because the injury litigated against would be incurred as a result of the disclosure of the party’s identity. The cases that have recognized such an interest are cases seeking to enjoin a disclosure of private facts….To hold otherwise would effectively permit all defamation plaintiffs to proceed by way of pseudonym.”
Rare Instance
The justice declared:
“[T]he use of pseudonyms, absent a specific statutory authorization, should be a limited and rare exception to the general rule of public access to courts. Before allowing a party to litigate under a pseudonym, the trial court must expressly find facts establishing an overriding interest that overcomes the right of public access to court records, and find a substantial probability that interest will be prejudiced if a pseudonym is not used.”
California Rules of Court, rule 550(d), curtailing the sealing of records, applies to redacting parties’ true names, Richardson said. That rule provides:
“The court may order that a record be filed under seal only if it expressly finds facts that establish: [¶] (1) There exists an overriding interest that overcomes the right of public access to the record; [¶] (2) The overriding interest supports sealing the record; [¶](3) A substantial probability exists that the overriding interest will be prejudiced if the record is not sealed; [¶] (4) The proposed sealing is narrowly tailored; and [¶](5) No less restrictive means exist to achieve the overriding interest.”
‘Robust Evidentiary Showing’
Richardson added:
“While defamation plaintiffs are not categorically foreclosed from proceeding pseudonymously, they are generally ill suited to do so; courts should require a robust evidentiary showing in such a case.
“In most cases, a party seeking to proceed pseudonymously should provide evidence supporting his or her motion to allow the trial court to make ‘[e]xpress factual findings’ on the matter….And to enable the court to conduct a recusal check, the party seeking to use a pseudonym should provide the parties’ real names under seal.”
The case is Roe v. Smith, 2025 S.O.S. 3349.
The First Amendment Coalition opposed the plaintiffs’ motion to litigate anonymously and appealed Tavelman’s order. It was represented by Eugene Volokh of the First Amendment Clinic at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Volokh said the actual names of the parties “won’t become public for a while yet, since there’s still time for plaintiffs to file petitions for review (or other forms of reconsideration, I expect).” He posted a description of the decision, saying that it is “only the third binding California precedent, as I see it, expressly dealing with pseudonymity (the others are DFEH v. Superior Court, from the Sixth District in 2022, and the considerably less detailed Santa Ana Police Officers Ass’n v. City of Santa Ana, from the Fourth District this Spring).
The defendants/respondents did not appear.
Copyright 2025, Metropolitan News Company