Oregon Supreme Court declines hearing Newberg school board members’ doxxing lawsuit

Published 11:15 am Monday, December 18, 2023

The state’s highest court has declined to hear a doxxing lawsuit brought by four current and former members of the Newberg school board.

The petition for review was denied by the Oregon Supreme Court on Dec. 7. It affirms an August ruling by the Oregon Court of Appeals reversing a lower court’s finding that the lawsuit brought by former board chairman Dave Brown, former vice-chairman Brian Shannon and current directors Trevor DeHart and Renee Powell was legal and could go forward.

As it stands now, the courts have decided that the lawsuit against teachers and parents of children enrolled in Newberg schools was without merit and that the information shared about the board members was an exercise of free speech.

The lawsuit was filed in 2020 by the four former and current members of the board against local residents Debbie Tofte, Katherine Barnett, AJ Schwanz and Tamara Brookfield, teachers and parents of children enrolled in Newberg schools.

Barnett was later dropped from the lawsuit, which alleged that the defendants illegally shared via the Newberg Equity in Education’s (NEED) Facebook page the private information of the board members in a practice known as “doxxing.”

The NEED page was created in 2020 when, soon after the George Floyd murder, Brown was the sole Newberg school board member to vote against a resolution condemning racism and committing to becoming an anti-racist school district. The NEED Facebook page listed about 650 members at the time the lawsuit was filed.

The school board’s counsel said in the lawsuit that Schwanz posted online that Brown was at the time employed by a nearby school district; that Barnett had shared information about Powell’s art being removed from a local tasting room; that Tofte shared information about DeHart’s job at a tech company and that Brookfield posted contact information for Shannon’s employer.

With the exception of information about Powell’s gallery show, all of the information shared by the defendants was at the time publicly available on the social media pages or campaign websites of the board members or was easily searchable through public records.

Still, the four board members insisted that the defendants’ intent was to harass them and they “knew or reasonably should have known that plaintiffs did not consent to that disclosure,” court records said.

They added that the postings, in some cases, served to threaten their livelihoods and made it difficult to remain in the community. Shannon testified during an unrelated case that he lost his job as a result of the doxxing and opponents’ contact with his employer.

In February 2022, Yamhill County Circuit Court Judge Jennifer Chapman found in favor of the four board members, saying “it is unclear from the record why such employment of the values of those private entities would be a matter of public interest” and added defendants Tofte and Brookfield failed to demonstrate why dissemination of the board members’ personal information was in the public interest.

She also found the defendants’ posts didn’t serve to spark conversation whether DeHart and Brown were qualified for the public positions they held or the controversial decisions they made while members of the school board.

The defendants countered that Chapman should dismiss the lawsuit under the state’s anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute, arguing that such lawsuits are unlawful as they are an attempt to curb political activism.

Chapman denied their motion and ruled that Tofte and Brookfield had failed to demonstrate that their conduct fell under the statute for an anti-SLAPP lawsuit. Instead, she determined that Brown had established a viable case against Schwanz and that she should have recognized that Brown had not consented to the release of personal information or information from the Canby School District.

The defendants appealed Chapman’s ruling to the Oregon Court of Appeals, which found that the lawsuit lacked merit and that Chapman should not have allowed it to go forward.

“We conclude that each defendant’s conduct was in furtherance of the exercise of the … constitutional right of free speech in connection with a public issue or an issue of public interest,” the court found in its ruling.

“We conclude that each defendant’s conduct was in furtherance of the exercise of the … constitutional right of free speech in connection with a public issue or an issue of public interest.”

– Oregon Court of Appeals