From Friday’s decision by Judge James Boasberg in Kartte v. Davis:
Defendant Trevor Davis hired Plaintiff Felix Kartte in 2020 to work at Davis’s security-consulting companies. Over the course of Plaintiff’s brief employment and in the period following, Defendant allegedly called him offensive names, made threats, shared false information about him with third parties, and invented claims of extortion. Plaintiff thus sued, alleging, inter alia, defamation, discrimination, and fraudulent misrepresentation. After over six months of litigation, the parties reached a settlement agreement.
They now seek to seal the entire case record. The Court denies that Motion because the documents at issue are judicial records that bear a strong presumption in favor of public access, which the parties have not overcome here….
Kartte began his employment with Davis in September 2020 as the Director of European Operation of CounterAction, LLC, one of Davis’s companies. Davis owns and operates both CounterAction, LLC and ToSomeone, Inc., which provide consulting services including “threat assessments, risk management, and information operations.” After Plaintiff began his new position, the two parties’ relationship quickly became acrimonious, with Davis firing him in a text message in November 2020. The Court’s prior Opinion provides all the gory details….
The right of “public access to judicial records ‘is a fundamental element of the rule of law, important to maintaining the integrity and legitimacy of an independent Judicial Branch.'” The common-law right “antedates the Constitution,” and “serves to produce an informed and enlightened public opinion.” …
The parties’ position that their filings are not judicial records [to which the right of access applies] is untenable. The unsealed documents on the docket have all been readily available to the Court and, for the most part, were “intended to influence the [C]ourt.” For example, the Complaints, Motion to Dismiss, Opposition, Reply, and Answer and Counterclaim are archetypical attempts to persuade the Court; others such as the Motions for Extension of Time, Motion to Seal Exhibits, Motion for Leave to File a Second Amended Complaint, and Motion to Seal the Case resulted, or will result, in judicial decisions. In addition, we apply the strongest presumption of public access to the Memorandum Opinion issued by this Court on May 6, 2022, which, as an official decision of the Court, is considered the “quintessential business of the public’s institutions,” and is “core ‘to the transparency of the court’s decisionmaking process.'”
The Motion alternatively urges the Court that documents that did not affect the Memorandum Opinion did not play a “role in any substantive decision by the Court” and are therefore not judicial records. To the extent that the parties construe the Opinion as the only judicial decision in this case, they ignore the Minute Orders directly deciding other Motions [citing Mot. for Leave to File SAC, Mot. for Extension of Time, and Mot. to Seal Exhs.]. The documents that affected the Court’s decisionmaking, therefore, extend far beyond those directly cited by the Memorandum Opinion.
Affecting a judicial decision is not a prerequisite for a document to be a judicial record, however. If that were the only inquiry, it would be difficult to identify judicial records because a document “can affect a court’s decisionmaking process even if the court’s opinion never quotes or cites it.” The Court instead asks whether the record was “intended to influence the court,” not whether it actually affected decisionmaking.
On a comprehensive review of the case’s docket, the Court finds that six documents were not intended to influence it. Those are ECF Nos. 2 (Summons), 4 (Random Assignment to Boasberg, J.), 5 (Davis’s Proof of Service), 6 (CounterAction’s Proof of Service), 7 (ToSomeone’s Proof of Service), and 25 (Stipulation of Dismissal). Yet, sealing those documents would not afford the relief that the parties are seeking because they do not contain any information that would be “damaging in the court of public opinion,” as the Motion alleges. As the parties make clear, their understandable preference is to seal the documents that describe the substance of the allegations.
And the court held that the presumption of public access wasn’t overcome here; among other things,
The Motion claims that the unsealed documents on the record will cause the parties “reputational damage and embarrassment” if they remain accessible to the public. The Motion cites various cases in support of its contention that the parties’ potential embarrassment and reputational damage create strong privacy interests. Those cases, however, all involve materials that were either subject to a protective order, were not already accessible to the public, or were not already filed with the court. Since the record in this case has long been docketed and publicly available and no documents are subject to a protective order, the Court does not find strong privacy interests that weigh in favor of sealing the currently unsealed documents.
In addition, any privacy interests that might be protected by sealing documents other than the Opinion are substantially weakened because the Opinion is unquestionably a judicial record with the strongest presumption of public availability, and it contains most of the substantive information that the parties claim is damaging to their reputation. In other words, the only real issue is the strength of the privacy interests that are implicated by the continued accessibility of documents beyond the Opinion. Here, they are weak because the Opinion covers most of the sensitive ground contained in the other documents that the parties allege would embarrass them and damage their reputations.
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