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Press freedom advocates and media lawyers in the United States have long warned about the rise of frivolous lawsuits intended to intimidate and silence journalists through expensive legal battles. But despite anecdotal evidence, the problem has remained amorphous. No one has been able to say just how bad it is because no one has closely tracked the filings, known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs.
A free speech group at New York University is trying to change that. In November, as President Donald Trump threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars in a continuation of his longtime habit of suing news outlets over coverage he dislikes, First Amendment Watch launched the SLAPP Back Initiative, a years-in-the-making database that aims to track all alleged SLAPPs in the United States. “This is very much a first step toward trying to get a handle on how bad the problem is,” Peter Madden, First Amendment Watch’s managing editor, said. “Transparency is the first step toward accountability.”
The database, the first of its kind in the United States, documented five hundred SLAPP cases in 2024. “There were way more than I anticipated,” Susanna Granieri, a reporter-researcher at First Amendment Watch, said. The initiative plans to document SLAPPs going back decades, Madden said; in January, the six-person team will also begin identifying SLAPPs filed in 2025. Like the US Press Freedom Tracker, which documents press freedom violations in real time, the SLAPP Back Initiative aims to eventually record SLAPPs as they are filed. By studying the lawsuits, the initiative hopes to identify repeat offenders and use data to push for anti-SLAPP policy reform.
Sixty-nine of last year’s cases involved the media, which the initiative defines as news outlets and individual journalists, as well as book publishers, documentary filmmakers, production houses, and social media influencers. They were brought against outlets like the Associated Press, the Hartford Courant, and the New York Times. Judges fully or partially dismissed forty-six, or 66 percent, considerably higher than the 49 percent of 2024 cases dismissed overall. The database “gives substance to the argument that we’ve been making for so many years” that most of these suits are frivolous, Jared Schroeder, a Missouri School of Journalism associate professor who researches SLAPPs, said. Other cases in the database targeted activists, politicians, whistleblowers, and consumers who left negative reviews online.
The stakes are high when SLAPPs go unchecked, lawyers say. “They silence truth-tellers,” Laura Prather, an Austin-based free speech attorney, said. They can also deter others from speaking out. “Without these voices, we can’t make informed decisions,” Prather, an adviser to the initiative, said. Stephen Solomon, a First Amendment Watch founding editor, agreed: “Spending all this money on a legal defense rather than on reporting what’s going on in this country and in the world hurts the public as well as the news organizations themselves.”
Even in states like California, which the Institute for Free Speech ranks as having among the strongest anti-SLAPP laws in the country, the suits can devastate news outlets. A yearslong libel suit against the Center for Investigative Reporting, which publishes Mother Jones and the radio show Reveal, nearly bankrupted the organization, according to Victoria Baranetsky, the center’s general counsel.
“Having experienced one of these lawsuits, the reality is that they can destroy lives, and they can destroy institutions that are committed to important work,” said Baranetsky, likewise an adviser to the initiative. “It’s a way to not only penalize a news institution but also change the mores and the value system in a culture as to how the press should be treated.”
The term “SLAPP” was coined in 1988, and thousands have since been filed around the United States. There’s no federal anti-SLAPP law, but thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have varying protections. So far, the First Amendment Watch database is limited to cases in which a judge cites anti-SLAPP legislation; it does not track SLAPPs in the twelve states that have no protections against them—like a 2021 suit that almost bankrupted a small newspaper in Wisconsin after the outlet reported on a local businessman’s use of an anti-gay slur at a county board meeting. “I would say very confidently that this database, which I’m so glad exists, is underrepresenting” the total number of such suits, Schroeder said.
The database is the brainchild of Prather, who is a partner at the law firm Haynes Boone. In 2022, she undertook a Fulbright fellowship in Paris, where she researched SLAPPs and the European Union’s response. It quickly became clear to Prather, who has worked on free speech law for more than three decades, that the United States was moving too slowly. “Europe is light-years ahead of us,” Prather said.
That momentum is one legacy of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was facing forty-two civil libel suits, most of them brought by Maltese politicians and their business associates, when she was assassinated with a car bomb in 2017. In 2024, the EU adopted an anti-SLAPP directive. To expose offenders, the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) organizes spoof awards like “SLAPP Politician of the Year.” Programs teach judges and lawyers to identify SLAPPs. Various organizations, like CASE and the Council of Europe’s Safety of Journalists platform, closely document SLAPP suits across the continent. Prather found that such mapping proved crucial in facilitating policy change, and she wants to replicate it in the United States.
“One of the reasons we haven’t been able to get a federal anti-SLAPP law passed, despite trying for fourteen years, is that we don’t have a complete picture of the problem,” Prather said. “In order to have lawmakers care, they have to know the examples of demonstrated need.” She hopes the database can be used to persuade lawmakers to develop and strengthen anti-SLAPP protections—and perhaps even establish a federal anti-SLAPP law.
A combination of factors, including an overburdened court system and the media industry’s general decline, make this database especially important now, Prather said. In October, Trump refiled a fifteen-billion-dollar defamation suit against the Times for allegedly defaming him during the 2024 election cycle. “Anti-SLAPP laws are the key to protecting democracy,” Prather said. “Without them, we’re in a world of hurt.”
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