If Your $108 Million Defamation Lawsuit Basically Admits To Everything People Are Horrified By, You Might Have Just Filed A SLAPP Suit

We need a federal anti-SLAPP law and strong state anti-SLAPP laws in all 50 states. And we need that as soon as possible. Anti-SLAPP/free speech law may not be as sexy these days as antitrust law, but, well, law shouldn’t be particularly sexy. Or involve much sex at all.

Joshua Wright apparently felt otherwise. Over the last month, Wright’s reputation has taken some hits as story after story has come out of him having often questionable relationships with law students, research assistants, and people who worked with him at the FTC and elsewhere.

Wright is a former FTC commissioner, law professor at George Mason University law school, and a well known expert on antitrust law with what I would describe as pretty traditional views regarding the “consumer welfare standard,” which has been the generally accepted view on antitrust law for decades. While this view is out of favor with the current FTC, Wright’s views place him squarely in the middle of traditional legal scholars’ views on antitrust.

A few weeks back, seemingly out of nowhere, Wright announced that he was leaving George Mason University to focus on consulting and private work. It was pretty widely known that a lot of big companies, including tech companies like Google and Amazon, paid him to advise them on their potential antitrust battles with the FTC.

Some eyebrows were raised by the abrupt departure, and they rose higher when law professor Christa Laser shared an email Wright had sent her when she had asked to talk with him about potential jobs at GMU (where Wright led the faculty hiring committee). She noted that she had applied in the past with no luck, but after she announced that she was single, he was then interested in meeting, and emailed her to ask if she would be open to a date. After she declined, she never heard from him again about the potential job.

A week later, Law360 published an article detailing the stories of two former students of Wright, who both claimed that they had a relationship with him while (and after) they were students, which included some fairly sketchy behavior.

Then, earlier this week, Bloomberg published an article after talking to a total of eight women who said that Wright had “used his positions and influence to proposition female students, staffers and job applicants.”

In between those two articles, Wright sued the two women who were at the center of the Law360 article for defamation, seeking $108 million and whining about how he’d lost lucrative consulting contracts as a result of their going public.

The complaint is gross on multiple levels. We always say that the hallmark of a vexatious defamation lawsuit, one designed to suppress speech the plaintiff does not like, is that it fails to lay out the explicit false statements of fact made by the defendants. That is absolutely the case in this lawsuit.

Nowhere does Wright lay out what false statements of fact are made by either of the former students he admits he slept with. The specific defamation claims are just vague statements:

Specifically, they falsely alleged to multiple clients, employers, and colleagues that Mr. Wright had conducted sexual misconduct.

They alleged in the Law360 article and in tweets, by direct allegations and by implications, that Mr. Wright was a sexual predator and had engaged in sexual harassment and misconduct.

There is more, but all of it is basically Wright saying that “yes, of course, I had sex with my former students and employees, but their feelings on the nature of that relationship are wrong.” Over and over again, Wright seems to think that his clearly admitted to pattern of behavior to seek out his female students and start sexual relationships with them was solely the result of consensual adults agreeing to have a relationship, with no recognition of the power indifference, and the influence both of them knew he had over their future careers.

Almost everything he describes as their “false statements” is simply attacking and refusing to acknowledge that these women have thoughts and feelings on their own, and can publicly talk about how they felt about the relationship. None of those are false statements of facts. They’re accurately describing their own feelings about the relationship.

Defendants’ campaign smeared Mr. Wright as a sexual predator and they told specific lies about him not helping them with their careers after the sexual relationship ended. Additionally, by claiming they felt they could not say “no,” they are falsely claiming that the relationship was not consensual.

Gross. Really, really gross. This isn’t just suing them for $100 million, this is literally saying that their expression of their own feelings regarding the relationship are a lie, rather than how they actually felt. How you feel is your opinion, and opinions are not defamatory. The women are clearly saying that they felt they needed to continue to sleep with their professor for their future. That Wright wants to convince himself that it was purely his animal magnetism or whatever is on him, but them expressing their feelings about the nature of the relationship is not defamatory.

And, note that the above paragraph says they told “specific lies,” but nowhere does he explain a single “specific lie.” All he does is attack their stated opinions about the nature of the relationship.

But, really, all of that is besides the point. The things that everyone is skeeved out about is the fact that Wright clearly shows a pattern of viewing an awful lot of his female law students as potential sexual partners, which is just flat out inappropriate. Wright does not seem willing to admit that any of this is problematic, only noting that GMU didn’t have a specific policy against this when he started some of these relationships.

Just because there’s no policy against it doesn’t mean that it’s not wrong, dude.

Much of the complaint is written in a manner that, again, basically admits to all of the underlying facts asserted by the women, which is what people are most horrified by. The very first sentence of the complaint basically admits to the very fact that everyone was most concerned about:

Defendants Elyse Dorsey and Angela Landry, both scorned, former lovers and law students of Plaintiff Joshua Wright…

So, uh, yeah, there’s really not much more to say than that. That’s basically the only fact that matters here. And the Bloomberg story makes it all much worse. In the Law360 story, one of the women said that Wright had scheduled what she thought was a “client meeting” in California, but when they got there, they had a single hotel room with a single bed. Wright, in his complaint, says that this was always planned as “a romantic getaway for two lovers to spend time in wine country.” Elsewhere in the complaint itself, Wright appears to admit that the “getaway” part meant getting away from each of their spouses, as they were married to other individuals at the time.

The Bloomberg piece, however, suggests that “schedule a trip with just a single bed in the room” is one of Wright’s go to moves, as other women reported the same thing:

Brandy Wagstaff, 2009 George Mason grad, said Wright began a two year sexual relationship with her in 2006 when she was a law school student and his research assistant. She said that he frequently sought sex in his law school office and reserved only one room with a single bed when they attended a 2007 conference in Boston.

And:

A George Mason student and former FTC intern for Wright said he invited her to help with a March 2014 conference hosted by the university in California. Wright made the travel arrangements and reserved only one room with a single bed, she said.

Those are both different from the original allegation from Dorsey.

Wright’s complaint also tries to make it out that the two women quoted in the Law360 article are upset that Wright “spurned” them by cutting off their relationship after getting serious with another woman. Though he leaves out one kinda important fact that is in the Bloomberg piece as well:

Wright’s current girlfriend is a former student who interned for him at the FTC.

Seems, I dunno, like something of a pattern? The complaint admits that the two women quoted in the Law360 article knew his current girlfriend. Which kinda leaves open the question: how many former students, research assistants, interns, etc., did Wright sleep with?

Wright’s excuse for all of this is that these were all consensual happy relationships, some of which lasted many years (it appears that many were overlapping, and Wright admits that many of these also overlapped with his marriage). At that point, whether or not one considers Wright to be a “sexual predator” certainly seems like an issue of opinion based on disclosed facts, which include a pretty long history of a high profile law professor with tremendous connections to companies, law firms, and government officials in a major area of law pursuing numerous students, research assistants, and employees.

As Joe Patrice at AboveTheLaw summarizes:

It seems Wright is a little confused about how being the #metoo bad guy works, because a professor saying “yeah, I totally screwed around with my 1Ls” is the sort of admission that gets you a good long way there. I mean, they don’t have to “portray themselves as #metoo victims” when your own complaint does it for them.

[….]

The complaint is an astounding monument to one man’s detachment from reality. He seems to think his professional reputation hangs on whether or not he intended to exploit his influence over the careers of his former students for sex. But, in 2023, his professional reputation is toast if clients see him as the sort of law school professor who juggled sexual relationships with multiple first-year students… which, as it happens, is the claim that he’s making the centerpiece of his suit!

Honestly, it’s difficult to imagine a more reputationally damaging account than the one Wright and his lawyers chose to lay out here.

Because reading this complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff… he’s telling the world that he’s a scumbag.

And, really, that’s why this seems to clearly be a SLAPP suit. Beyond Wright’s complaint admitting to basically everything that has so many people horrified (and making it all worse in the process by making it clear he sees nothing wrong with regularly bedding students), beyond the complaint naming no actual false statements of fact, beyond the fact that the complaint seeks $108 million dollars, the whole thing seems to have mostly been an attempt to get these (and potentially other women) to shut up.

That’s what makes it a SLAPP suit. While it didn’t work, given that Bloomberg got more stories from more women, some of those women refused to put their names in public, perhaps to avoid a similar lawsuit.

This is why SLAPP suits are so nefarious. Defending against them is a huge pain. They take time, money, and just a ridiculous amount of energy and attention (and, in cases like these, one has to constantly relive an incident and deal with an awful person).

Virginia just strengthened its previously weak anti-SLAPP law, and it went into effect July 1, though I don’t think the newly amended version has been tested yet (the old version was very weak). If anything, this seems like a good test case for that law.