As part of the 2026 Hot Topics in Environmental Law lecture series, Professor Jared Carter JD’09, Vermont Law and Graduate School, and Heather Murray, Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, discuss how defamation and related claims, often constituting Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), have recently been used as a sword to attempt to silence environmental advocacy organizations and journalists, and the potential defenses provided by state anti-SLAPP laws.
Narrator
This podcast is the production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, a Vermont law and graduate school.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Professor Christoph Courchesne, faculty director of the Environmental Law Center and associate dean for Environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Welcome to the 2026 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. Today, I am pleased to welcome my colleague Jared Carter, Professor Jared Carter and Heather Murray from the Cornell First Amendment Clinic.
So I'll start by just saying a few things about Jared. He's a professor of law here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. He's also an alum who graduated in 2009. In addition to serving as an articles editor on the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law. He received an Equal Justice Foundation fellowship to litigate a constitutional challenge to U.S. Treasury Department regulations prohibiting travel to Cuba.
He is a veteran attorney and advocate for social, legal and economic justice. He did a clerkship on the Montana Supreme Court. After graduating, he returned to Vermont in 2010, and since then, he's been teaching a variety of courses here, including natural resources, legal writing, appellate advocacy, constitutional law, First Amendment law. The list goes on for Professor Carter. He is still an active attorney working on cases and is currently working with the Cornell First Amendment Law Clinic.
And so that brings us to our second guessed that we're delighted to have here with us today. Heather Murray is the associate director of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and the managing attorney of the clinic's local journalism project. In addition to teaching the clinic seminar on free speech and freedom of the press, she manages all aspects of the Cornell Local Journalism Project.
Her work includes representation of journalists and news outlets in litigation and counseling. Training on non litigation matters. Supervision of staff attorneys, Summer Fellows, clinic students, and recent alumni. Co-counsel. Representation of Amicus Curiae in Free Press Matters and Grant reporting. She previously was a litigation associate at two international law firms, and during her time there received a 2018 Law360 Distinguished Legal Writing Award from the Burton Foundation.
Prior to her legal career, she worked as a journalist at local newspapers in New York. She's a graduate of Cornell Law School and Duke University. She's a member of the Advisory Committee of pro-German, a pro-bono initiative for four journalists that is housed at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She serves as a chair of the Board of directors of Queens based Child Welfare Agency for sale.
Welcome, Heather. We are delighted to have you. We're delighted to have you, Jared, as well. Today they will co-present a conversation on environmental advocacy and defamation in the SLAPP era. So please join me in welcoming professors Jared Carter and Heather Murray.
Jared Carter
Thanks, Christophe, and it's terrific to be here. We are talking about environmental advocacy in the era of strategic lawsuits against public participation. SLAPP And it might sound like a wonky, you know, bunch of law professors hanging out talking about something in the weeds that really has no impact on our day to day lives. And what hopefully we get out of this conversation here is and understanding not only of some of the wonky in the weeds law professor lawyer stuff, but also a realization that this is, in fact a really, really important topic with respect to not just environmental advocacy, but advocates writ large, journalists, folks that are participating in public life in any way should
be, I think, concerned. And so I want to talk a bit about at the outset what are slaps, right. And defamation. So, as I said, strategic lawsuit against public participation. What does that boil down to? Really? We're talking about a meritless and or abusive lawsuit that's meant to burden speech on matters of public concern. It could be environmental advocacy, it could be journalism, could be any form of advocacy, public participation.
But it's meant to do that, to really harass and burden speech rather than redress any actual cognizable legal harm. And what what we think and why this is important now is that this threat is really putting untenable pressure on environmental advocacy and advocates in particular. And in my view, what we're seeing is an increasing weaponization of SLAPP statutes by powerful corporations that are weaponizing litigation to try to chill that critical public participation.
Right. Whether it's climate change, whether it's pollution, whether it's any other pressing environmental issue. They're using these as a way to try to chill that speech. And their goal is and this is what's scary on their face, the goal of a slap suit, right? A strategic lawsuit against public participation is really to overwhelm the defendants who are the advocates with litigation costs.
The emotional toll of being sued or being scared about being sued. Right. To really silence what I think both Heather and I view as really important First Amendment protected speech. Again, whether it's journalism or advocacy in the environmental space, but so critical when it comes to matters of public concern. It is deterring that public participation that I think if you look at history has been so critical to any any progress in the United States.
Yeah, And not only that, for the lawyers out there paying attention, I think this deters public interest litigation as well. And we'll talk about some cases in a little while that that that's been the case. So that's really what SLAPP is. It can take some different forms. Primarily, what we're going to talk about today is the form of a civil defamation suit, right, where someone or some company sues or maybe even the president.
The United States sues in defamation, the tort of defamation, libel, slander to try to what we view as stop speech. And I just want to leave you with one quote, and then Heather and I are going to kind of alternate back and forth. So hopefully it flows pretty seamlessly. But we want this to be, you know, kind of hearing from some different perspectives and then hopefully some questions and conversation.
But I want to leave you with one quote from a New York court all the way back in 1992, I think before this was really as burdensome of a thing as it is today. And what the New York court said is, quote, sort of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression and can scarcely be imagined.
Right. So this is serious stuff. This isn't just law professor is in the weeds when it comes to public participation in our political process, in our legal process, in moving the country forward on so many issues, environmental in particular. So we're going to talk about the architecture of that. We're going to talk about some of the circuit splits that are leading to some serious issues.
We're going to talk about some specific cases, some of which Heather and I have been directly involved in. And then we're going to propose some ideas to think about ways to reform and and strengthen the First Amendment protections that are so critical here. So that I'll turn it over to Heather.
Heather Murray
Great. And I just like to underscore something that Jared was saying a little while ago that really anyone, anywhere can be the target of a slap. So while we think of these as largely being brought against journalists and against advocacy organizations, they can also be brought against an everyday consumer, or that speaking out about a faulty product or about a restaurant they didn't like, or about a nursing home that has treated a parent poorly.
So it's really, really everyone in society needs to learn about SLAPP suits. They are on the rise in virtually every developed country. And as Jared was saying, they really seek to silence truth tellers. So I'm going to start off with just an overview of one of the tools to fight against these suits is anti-SLAPP Statutes. I'm going to give you an overview of those.
As of March 2026, there are roughly 40 states and D.C. having enacted what's called anti-SLAPP laws, which is really a tool to provide a mechanism that results in the early dismissal of a suit that could otherwise drag on for several years. There are sort of several features of good anti-SLAPP statutes. The first is sort of covering sort of the nature of the speech that it protects.
And a broad one would protect speech made in any forum on any matter of public concern. I will say some statutes are read it more narrowly and it only protects speech. That's directly addressed to a governmental body. But good ones read that broadly. And then another feature is that discovery is staid once what's an entire SLAPP motion is filed.
And that really is sort of critical because in is, as all the lawyers on the call know, that discovery is where you start really racking up expenses for defendants in a suit. So so this is really, really key here and I SLAPP motions also typically trigger a two step process where the first step is borne by the defendant, the second by the plaintiff.
And if the defendant satisfies the burden of establishing that the speech is covered by the anti-SLAPP statute, then the burden of proof shifts to the plaintiff to demonstrate that the claim is meritorious. And so they have to do that early on in the suit, which obviously is impossible for SLAPP plaintiffs, because sort of the cynic on of these types of suits is that they lack legal merit.
Right. And then another strong feature of good anti-SLAPP statutes is that the defendant, when they win, can recover costs and attorney fees from the plaintiff. And then and then another one is the right to interlocutory appeal. If you do lose, lose that motion.
So I think you might say, wait a minute, there's a whole bunch of states that already have these. Some states have even adopted what's called the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, which is a uniform law. I think 15 or some odd states as of January had done that. And I think Heather shared some data on on states that have done other things.
And so I guess you might wonder why, why why is this a problem? We've already got these, you know, across the country to protect against SLAPP statutes. Here's the problem, right? A lot of times what we're seeing in our lawsuits in federal court, right. You think about a big company like Exxon and a small nonprofit in California, right?
You've got diversity. And so we're seeing these cases, these defamation claims being brought in federal court. And the real problem with that, among many others, is that federal courts are really split over the applicability of these anti-SLAPP statutes, which are state laws in those federal diversity cases. Right. We have an eerie doctrine problem. Right. So the central sort of difficulty here.
Right. Is that in anti-SLAPP, as Heather just pointed out, anti-SLAPP statute is sort of this weird blend of procedural mechanisms and substantive First Amendment protections. And so the courts, the federal courts are sort of stuck in this situation where they're trying to figure out under Erie. Right. Which looks at is the state law procedural or substantive? They're trying to figure out what are these anti-SLAPP statutes.
And they have sort of pieces of both, right, substantive First Amendment protections and then procedural mechanisms like getting a case dismissed early on or interlocutory appeals, those sorts of things. And so what that's led to is a real lack of uniformity across the country, right? Because courts are really struggling to figure out when they're sitting in diversity, these federal courts, what do we do with this?
And if you have a situation where there's, you know, real differences across the country, what do you think the upshot is? You end up with forum shopping. You end up with a non-uniform protection for what our first fundamental First Amendment rights with respect to public participation in the process. And so we want to just highlight a couple of those things here with respect to some of the circuits to illustrate that.
And the first circuits that I want to just briefly touch on to illustrate this circuit split, which again, we think is a real problem when it comes to something like the First Amendment and how it applies. Right? It would be you'd have different rights effectively in one circuit than you would in another, Right? That's not tenable, we would argue.
So in the first and ninth circuits, we see some overlap and some distinction, right? Both apply at least some provisions of state anti-SLAPP laws in federal diversity cases. They haven't entirely just said, you know, this is substantive or rather this is procedural and therefore we're not going to apply it in federal court. Over the years, the Ninth Circuit has sort of ebbed and flowed.
There was a case back in 1999. I won't get into the specifics of it here, but they essentially said that an anti-SLAPP motion and the fee shifting provisions of it. Right. That fee shifting provision apply in federal court because they can essentially exist side by side with the federal rules of civil procedure. Right. The Ninth Circuit has chipped away at that a little bit over the years.
And in a in a case early on in the in the 2000s said that California's discovery stay provision right. That the one that Heather pointed out that says you know once a anti-SLAPP motion has been filed, Discovery stops, therefore cutting off a lot of expenses to a small nonprofit advocacy organization or an individual or a journalist or journalistic outlet.
Right. The Ninth Circuit said, nope, That provision conflicts with Rule 56 of the federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the summary judgment rule. And so didn't apply that and the Ninth Circuit's chipped away at it in many other procedural aspects as well. The First Circuit also has done some interesting things. The First Circuit about a decade ago said that Maine's anti-SLAPP statute applies with respect to the burden shifting because that's substantive.
And they've also ultimately upheld the the right to an interlocutory appeal, which actually can cut both ways. And yes, it protects the defendant their ability if they lose the anti-SLAPP motion to immediately appeal. But it also allows the other side as a general rule as well. So it can cut both ways. But I share what the first tonight just sort of an example of this patchwork approach.
And I think Heather's going to talk a little bit about some of the other circuits. And unfortunately, the majority of circuits have ruled the other way. The second, the fifth, the 10th, the 11th, and the D.C. circuits. Jared and I are quite familiar with the Fifth Circuit ruling in in blocking because we had a case litigating that very issue where back in 2019, the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion after sort of several years where where this issue of whether whether anti-SLAPP statute applied in federal court had been brewing in the circuit with with various district court opinions where a three judge panel unanimously held that Texas as anti-SLAPP statute conflicts with the federal rules of civil procedure, specifically rule 12 and 56 and so does not apply in federal diversity actions. And so you are seeing, like Jared mentioned earlier, a rise in forum shopping that even has a name in the SLAPP context. SLAPP tourism for this very reason.
Jared Carter
Yeah, Yeah. It's it's literally a crazy world out there and it's so different. It makes it really hard for advocates to know, you know, what they're what they're what's protected and what isn't. And that in and of itself, I think has a real chilling effect. And you'd think, Right, okay, we've got this circuit split and we've got sort of different things happening all over the country.
This is a fundamental First Amendment issue. You'd say, gosh, you'd think the Supreme Court would have spoken on this, although right now I'm not sure whether we'd want the Supreme Court to speak on it necessarily. But for better or worse, they haven't. Yeah, the Supreme Court has been silent on how this sort of sugar out in those diversity cases.
And it's not because they haven't had a chance. Yeah, there was a case recently that was brought to the court, was petition for cert to the court. Clifford versus Trump. And I would just pause there for a moment to extemporaneously talk a little bit about my theory of this. One of the things that I one of the reasons I think we're seeing an increase in this now, at least in my view, this is my personal opinion based on the research that I've done, is that, in fact, the result of the commander in chief himself summation.
And I think that's almost opened up the floodgates to change the norms in some ways such that now, folks, companies, corporations or otherwise who may be felt uncomfortable using defamation as a tool are emboldened. And I think that's that's a problem. And the case that I want to just touch on very briefly here, the Clifford v Trump case, I think is in some ways indicative of that reality.
So in that case, there was a woman, Clifford, who brought a defamation action in federal court against President Trump after the president tweeted that she was a con job and accused her of lying, of lying about an incident that she alleged that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with her and she filed the defamation suit against the president.
And the president filed an anti-SLAPP motion under Texas anti-SLAPP law now seeking to dismiss the suit and was successful in Texas in doing that. That was appealed. All the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court on this issue. And the Supreme Court said, no, we're not going to hear the case. There were no concurrences, dissents, right? They just said no.
Apparently unanimously. Right. Or for whatever reason, we're not going to we're not going to hear the case. And so the upshot is that until either the court takes it on or Congress acts, advocates journalists, your average, you know, person, I think, faces a real unpredictable and uneven protection when it comes to that First Amendment, that First Amendment participation in in the public sphere in some way. And we're not making this up. I mean, obviously, you know that, But I want to just sort of walk through that sort of the evidence of this really becoming a serious problem and not one that's just sort of static, one that's, I think, growing and growing quickly and therefore demands a response. And so here's the data. Here's what the data says.
I teach advocacy courses. One of the things I talk about is be careful with data. It's not always that persuasive and you can twist it however you want. That narrative in storytelling is much better now, but I'm going to hope that this data will at least inform the story that we're telling. Right? So between 2012 and 2022, the Earth right Earth Rights International, right.
So this is a reputable source identified at least 152 cases where the fossil fuel industry in particular brought slap or other judicial harassment mechanisms against environmental advocates. Right. Of those, 93 were lawsuits. Right. So that might not sound like a huge number. Gosh, 100 lawsuits in ten years. Right. But these are very, very important because of the impact they have not just on the actual litigants, but on the chilling effect that it has on others.
Right. So it's not just those 93 organizations who suffered the lawsuits. It's it's we all see that as advocates and we say, wait a minute, I'm going to be very careful in what I say because of that fear of of of a costly SLAPP suit. There also dozens of of of subpoenas which earth rights international determined to be abusive subpoenas.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Center found 24 slaps by 12 major fossil fuel companies against 70 plus individuals in the three years between 2015 and 2018. So it's increasing. And they were collectively seeking almost $1,000,000,000 in damages. Right. You think about your average environmental nonprofit that many Vermont law and graduate school students go and work for that.
Right. $1,000,000,000 is a really big number, right? These are organizations that are often working on a shoestring to do really, really important work in the public sphere. So these are these have a serious chilling effect. A large a supermajority of environmental slaps target advocates who are raising land or environmental related concerns. Right. And it's resource extraction sectors that dominate that.
Right. So it's folks who are standing up against resource extraction, who seem to be the ones that are the most targeted by these in the environmental space right now. And the U.N.. Right. There's a special rapporteur, I think it's pronounced correctly. Mary Lawler was thanks spoke about this now, because it's it's raised the attention of the international community as well.
She said that they've really become a staple in the manipulation of the judicial system, in her view, by the business sector to stop legitimate human rights work. Right. She's talking about human rights work. I see obvious intersection between environmental justice, environmental advocacy and human rights. So this is a serious concern. Right now. 60% of those cases decided cases were dismissed or resolved in the defendant's favor.
Right. About a quarter of them are voluntarily dropped. But that's only after the defendant's right. The advocates expended, obviously, substantial resources. So if you're a small environmental advocacy or advocacy organization or small journalistic outlet, you want to know what the that's going to have a real impact on your ability to do that really, really important work. And so even if the majority of these are dismissed or a significant percentage are voluntarily dropped, it still has a very significant impact.
That's why the anti-SLAPP is so, so important. Right? So that's where it is in the environmental space. Yeah, it impacts journalists as well.
Heather Murray
Yes. Journalists are unsurprisingly one of the biggest targets of SLAPP suits, given that one of their key roles in society is the fourth estate is to hold government and others in society accountable. And sometimes we have it in our intersection and where a journalist is covering an environmental issue. Take, for example, John Oliver, who was sued in 2017 by coal magnate Bob Murray.
No relation to me. That suit was eventually dismissed. In 2024 alone, 69 cases involving an anti SLAPP motion that was decided on the merits involved the media. According to NYU's First Amendment Watch, they're doing a lot of good work in this space tracking SLAPP suits because we don't know the size of the problem. It's difficult to really address it.
So among those affected, just in 2024 alone were the biggest national news organizations from the Associated Press to NBC News to ProPublica, streaming giants Netflix and HBO. In a variety of news outlets, from California to Connecticut to Louisiana to Washington State to New York, to Texas, to Vermont. Our clinic actually won a case seven years ago on behalf of a citizen journalist who ran a watchdog blog called The Geneva Believer.
This is a case that Jared worked on with the clinic where our client was sued by a local construction company after he wrote a series of articles in which he examined and at times criticized the city's bidding process and the relationship between the construction company and the city. And Jared's already alluded to this by obviously in recent years, particularly with Trump's second term, SLAPP suits have been repeatedly in the news against media organizations, including a CBS Wall Street Journal recently with the publication of his letter in Epstein's 50th birthday book, the sort of $10 billion suit that was brought against BBC over January six documentary editing.
So this continues to be an incredibly concerning issue for journalists and cannot defend a lawsuit on their own. And so they rely on people like Jared and me and other other lawyers in the audience, I'm sure, to assist when these challenges come.
Jared Carter
Yeah, absolutely. And I would just share just a piggyback on something that you said, Heather. Right. These are not with respect to journalists, but but advocates as well. This is not something that is sort of just happening far away at the federal level. I mean, in the past two weeks, I've heard from a journalist who was threatened with a defamation suit by a sitting senator.
And and so we see this happening across the country. And and I think, you know, it's troubling for for the obvious reasons. But as Heather pointed out, we want to highlight a couple of of three or four key cases in the environmental space, since this isn't in the hot topics of an environmental law in the end that I think illustrate sort of the progression and some of the challenges that the courts are facing when it comes to applying anti-SLAPP and how to deal with the rise in SLAPP suits.
And so I want to go all the way back to 2010 to talk about something that Greenpeace and they seem to be involved in a fair number of these was was was doing and the response that it elicited from a company called Resolute Forest Products. So back in 2010, Greenpeace was working with some other environmental organizations to run essentially a public advocacy campaign against Resolute Forest products.
And part of that campaign they labeled Resolute a Forest destroyer and were urging publishers and retailers essentially to stop sourcing products from their logging activities, largely in the far north of Canada in the boreal forests. And so after a few years of this, apparently Resolute got fed up and they filed suit in the northern district of California, they made a whole bunch of claims.
They made state law claims of defamation and unfair competition. But they also raised federal RICO counts, essentially alleging that Greenpeace had been acting, had been in essentially in an enterprise with these other organizations in a pattern of racketeering activity, using mail, wire fraud, fundraising, false statements in order to further this scheme. And I will say we've seen in the case law that strategy essentially reformulating what basically is a defamation claim into a RICO claim has been something that the industry has used.
Now, one of one reason being you want to know what you can get for Rico, you can get treble damages, right? So we're talking about a multiplier here and you get to litigate in federal court, right? Because it's a federal law, a federal issue. So we've seen that as a strategic approach that industry has taken that Greenpeace had a ton of support.
In that case, the reporters committee, a bunch of environmental organizations, a bunch of other media outlets. So they were well supported. In the end, the district court struck the state law, claims they applied California's anti-SLAPP statute and struck those those those those defamation and unfair competition claims. They dismissed the RICO counts in the essentially and and the and the and the fraud implicit in that.
But even though that sounds sort of like a win, they there was a critical limit to what where how far the federal court in that case was willing to go. And I think this carries over into a lot of the other cases that we see moving along. But what they essentially said was that that California's anti-SLAPP law does not apply to federal law causes of action.
Right. So they didn't apply it to the RICO claims or any other federal claims. So even though they got those dismissed, those were under the federal rules of civil procedure and they allow code for Rezolute to file an amended complaint. Right. So that's very different than the way that anti-SLAPP, the California, anti-SLAPP and most state anti-SLAPP laws work, right?
Once you get dismissed under anti-SLAPP, it's usually dismissed, meaning it's dismissed with prejudice. They can't bring it back. But this limitation that the court applied essentially allowed Rezolute to come back again. And the upshot is it costs a heck of a lot of money to defend. So even though Greenpeace was ultimately successful and in fact there was fee shifting that came back to them. Right. The emotional toll, the financial toll was great. Yeah. And so I think it's just indicative of the fact that that industry, I think, realized, hey, we can use this as a tool, right? Even if even if in that instance, maybe the outcome wasn't as bad. Fast forward a few years. Another important case that is in is, I think, an offshoot of this and shows the progression that we're facing was a case called City of San Francisco, V, Exxon, and you all might recall this, and although there's been a lot of these in recent years, so sometimes it's hard to keep them all straight.
But this was in 2017, 2018. California's cities and counties, although led largely by San Francisco and Oakland, filed climate change lawsuits in California state court against five of the major fossil fuel companies, including Exxon. And they alleged, among other things, public nuisance and, you know, unfair, deceptive acts regarding Exxon's misleading of folks in the climate change space. Right.
And there's some other nuances in there, but that was the general gist. Right. Well, what did Exxon do instead of just defending it itself in court in California, it's filed using a peculiar rule in Texas, although I found out a lot of states have this a pre suit discovery petition. Right. They went in and got the Texas courts to allow them to do that.
Many states have varying mechanisms like that that essentially allow for some level of pre suit discovery before there's even a lawsuit. And so they did that in Texas. And their goal was to try to evaluate the potential claims for constitutional violations, abuse of process and civil conspiracy against the California municipalities. Right. So here's this case. They are trying to apply California law in California.
And Exxon says, well, we're going to go to Texas now and we're going to use this pre discovery mechanism to try to get get at you. And and that's what they did. And and I think the upshot here is that while the Texas Court of Appeals reversed Exxon's petition because of jurisdictional requirements, they said the California respondents lack the minimum context.
So in the end, it went all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court and it cost a lot of money for the cities and towns who have been doing this work to defend this issue. And so I think, you know, in the end, this the importance of whether it's a federal law and we'll talk about some of these or the court acting or the states adopting some sort of uniform law like some have, becomes more and more important so that you can get outside of these issues.
One of the things that came up in Texas and this this went all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court was because this pre suit discovery mechanism was prior to litigation. The anti-SLAPP law didn't apply at all. Right. They said you have to be inactive litigation for it to apply. And you can cost an advocate, a journalist, an environmental advocate, a boatload of money such that they're going to self-censor through this mechanism prior to litigation. And if the anti slaps don't apply at all, then there's literally no protection for them. So it's a real problem that we're seeing as this develops.
Heather Murray
Yeah. So fast forward a few years and Jared brings a case to the clinic that we worked on at the Motion to Dismiss Stage ads, another case involving Exxon, Exxon V BONTER What was really interesting about this case is that the speech issue involved a press conference regarding a lawsuit that had been filed by four environmental organizations, including our client Surfrider, against Exxon.
And that press conference really should be at the core of First Amendment protections protected speech, right? They're exercising their right to petition. And yet after doing that, they then were faced with a lawsuit by Exxon. And instead of filing in California, even though all of the conduct that was at issue took place in California and also involved the California attorney general who had done an investigation into Exxon and filed a parallel suit sort of the same day that these four environmental organizations filed, filed suit, they decided to file in in Texas for the reason that Jared and I mentioned earlier, that the Fifth Circuit does not allow anti-SLAPP to be filed in federal court.
And what was interesting about the the original case that the four environmental organizations filed against Exxon is they're really challenging something that Exxon has been doing for many years, which is called advanced recycling. So many of you may know the traditional recycling methods involve sort of shredding, melting or reusing plastic material, but not really altering the chemical makeup of of that material and advanced recycling, which is what Exxon has done for many years, takes a different approach where it sort of breaks down the plastics into liquid and gas molecules.
And that technology, according to the California attorney general and to the environmental organizations that sued really sort of has struggled over the years to deliver on its promises. And the suit they filed said that Exxon has had really misled consumers. Right. Of course, Exxon was unhappy about about the suits filed against it and so then filed the SLAPP suit in Texas.
As I said, we represented Surfrider, which really there was very scant mention of Surfrider. Even in the suit. There was one statement in a footnote that concerned a press release that our client had put out. And the statement that was quoted actually was made by a representative of a different nonprofit. So you really had no statement even made by our client.
That's sort of what ended its way through the courts. Ultimately, there was a good result for our client and the other environmental organizations in that the suit was dismissed against them, not on the merits, but on personal jurisdiction grounds. Really, that that the activities at the center of the suit took place in California, not in Texas. The suit really should have been filed there.
You know, Jared was mentioning earlier that there are a number of sort of tack on claims that are admitted to defamation oftentimes in the suit, and that that did happen here, tortious interference, conspiracy and a number of other other claims as well. And so this is a good example of of a case where if there was a federal anti-SLAPP law that protected environment advocates in the rest of us, then this wouldn't have happened.
Right. But we ultimately got to a good result. But it it took a significant amount of time and resources away from the environmental organizations that had to fight that suit. And then the last case we're going to talk about, which will take us back in time to 2017, is another suit involving Greenpeace Energy Transfer B, Greenpeace International, and I'm sure most recall sort of the massive Indigenous led protests over the Dakota Access pipeline that runs near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Hundreds of people were arrested in demonstrations and in 2017, the company who built the Pipeline Energy Transfer, filed a federal lawsuit seeking $900 million in damages against Greenpeace International Greenpeace Inc, which is in the US, an individual alleging defamation and racketeering, as Jared mentioned earlier. And in February 19, the Federal District Court dismissed that case and the RICO claim was dismissed with prejudice.
A week later, Energy Transfer refiled in North Dakota State Court, which really lacks meaningful anti-SLAPP protections and revived the claims that were previously dismissed in federal court. Greenpeace at the time characterized this case as one of the largest SLAPP suits ever filed. Nine statements were at issue in that case, which of fell into three categories The statements regarding the routing of the pipeline through tribal or native lands with them really trying energy transfer really trying to focus on whether the pipeline passed through the reservation, which was not the actual statement.
The statements they made were whether it passed through tribal or native land, which was an accurate reflection of what was happening there, damage and desecration of cultural sites, and then the use of force on protesters last year. Some of you may be aware that a jury ordered Greenpeace and other groups to pay more than $660 million. And then that sum was cut about half by the trial court. The still over $345 million for charges, including defamation, trespass, nuisance and deprivation of property access. And what's interesting in this case, it's still not over for a number of reasons. One, in North Dakota, they're seeking a motion for Greenpeace, seeking a motion for another trial. Now. But separately, they also filed Greenpeace International filed suit in the Netherlands. There's an EU anti-SLAPP directive and there are also protections under Netherlands law and the court in the Netherlands that's adjudicating this case just last week ruled that it could proceed, not interestingly, not under the EU Directive, because they found that the EU Directive went into effect after the suit was filed.
And so it wasn't retroactive, but under Netherlands law it could move forward. And of course, they're seeking to recoup all of the costs of this multi-year or massive litigation.
Jared Carter
But the bottom line here, I think that I would just sort of share briefly at the end is this circuit split, the lack of action by the Supreme Court. It's not just doctrinal, right? This is not just in the weeds lawyers. Right. What it's doing, in my view, is actively enabling powerful corporations like Exxon to silence not just environmental advocates, but largely, but also indigenous communities, public officials, journalists, if not with direct lawsuits, but with the threat or fear of it. So it has a tremendous chilling effect. And there's some good solutions out there. We're not doing them right now, though.
Christophe Courchesne
Well, thank you, Jared and Heather. It was a fascinating conversation. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. To view the full lecture with the Q&A afterward, please visit our YouTube channel at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Narrator
If you want to hear more about hot topics on environmental law and policy issues, check us out at the Hothouse Earth podcast wherever you get your podcasts.