Dan Snyder files suit in India against meaww.com, others
August 11, 2020
Updated August 11, 2020, 9:30 am
by Steve Thomas
The Hog Sty has obtained court documents filed on behalf of Washington Football Team owner Dan Snyder in a trial court in New Delhi, India, in late July against a number of defendants, including a company called Eleven Internet Services LLP, the website meaww.com, and 5 residents of India, including one John Doe. This lawsuit is a response to two published articles that alleged various forms of salacious conduct by Snyder, including unsourced rumors regarding sex trafficking, an association with Jeffrey Epstein, and drug and alcohol abuse. The Hog Sty has also obtained related filings in federal court in California regarding discovery and deposition requests for the Indian case.
I am obviously not licensed to practice law in India, so I won’t attempt give specific details of the procedural aspects of the case. However, the basics are that the Indian petition alleges defamation by the defendants against Snyder and cites two separate articles published on the website meaww.com (we have chosen not to provide links to the articles) on July 16, 2020, as the basis for the claims against the defendants. Snyder unsurprisingly claims that the authors and publishers of the website lacked sources and foundation for the stories, and further asserts the stories are completely false, and that he has been harmed by the false publications. The petition states that Snyder’s attorneys contacted the website shortly after publication last month and ordered them to take down the offending stories, which the website claimed to do, and disclose their sources; however, the stories allegedly remained live on the site, at least in limited fashion, thereby causing Snyder to file the lawsuit. According to the petition, the website gets over one billion page views per month, thus causing Snyder significant damage to his reputation and goodwill, among other things. The individual defendants are the owners of the site and the writers of the stories.
The most interesting portion of the Indian court filing are Snyder’s allegations as to meaww.com. According to the petition, this website is “frequently hired (many times anonymously) by Governments and intelligence services in order to spread disinformation on rivals”, with a “ ‘social media following of over 15 million’ across multiple jurisdictions.”
Snyder’s petition alleges various forms of defamation under the tenants of Indian law, citing their constitution and some international laws, and seeks monetary damages and multiple forms of injunctive relief; meaning, orders by the Indian court that the defendants must (1) remove the two offending articles and block them from viewing on any of the defendants’ platforms worldwide, and (2) refrain from publishing defamatory materials against Snyder in the future.
The injunctions are to be expected and are similar to normal relief that would be requested in a lawsuit in the United States. However, by far most telling request for relief in this lawsuit is a demand for the Indian court to order the defendants to “disclose the details as to who had hired the Defendants to publish the stories and from where they had obtained information” regarding the two articles in question.
The use of the words “disclose the details as to who had hired the Defendants” is a clear and unambiguous signal that Snyder believes unknown people intentionally initiated a smear campaign against him, and he wants to learn the identity of those people. His attorneys could have simply stated something along the lines of “disclose the sources that formed the basis for the articles, if any”, but they didn’t. Instead, the petition claims the defendants were “hired” to publish the false material, and that the defendants are frequently hired to start disinformation campaigns. The petition first explains that this website has been hired by parties, including governments, to spread disinformation for pay, and then requests the Court to order the defendants to reveal who “hired” them to write the articles in question. The petition was intentionally written in that fashion.
Snyder appears to believe that he’s been the victim of an intentional and organized informational “hit job”, for lack of a better term, and figuring out who did it seems to be the real goal of this lawsuit. Obviously, Snyder wants an injunction against these people and isn’t going to turn down a financial award, but, at least in the United States, monetary judgments are hard to collect from sleazy websites. Based on these pleadings, I suspect Snyder’s main focus here is to learn who did this to him, and he believes this in more than just a disenchanted employee talking to a tabloid.
The portion of this lawsuit that is in federal court in California is simply a request for a court order for a company called New Content Media, Inc. to produce written discovery and a corporate representative for deposition. This company is based in California but is alleged to be run by the same people as is the Indian company and thus appears to be the United States arm of the website’s parent entity in India.
Details for the main lawsuit in India will be hard to come by, and any discovery produced by New Content Media, Inc., and any deposition transcripts of their corporate representative depositions will not be filed in the public record, so these proceedings might remain a mystery for some time. The Hog Sty will, of course, bring you all of the details that we can find as they become available.
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UPDATE:
Lawyers for Washington owner Dan Snyder made a second filing in U.S. federal court late yesterday, this time in the Eastern District of Virginia. This filing is another request for the U.S. Court to order discovery related to Snyder’s main Indian case; however, the big news from this filing is that it names an allegedly disgruntled former team executive assistant, Mary Ellen Blair, and a company called Comstock Holding Companies, Inc. In the Virginia action, Snyder alleges that Blair was bribed to provide information related to the two allegedly defamatory articles. Comstock is an apartment management company operating in Virginia that allegedly manages a complex at which Blair allegedly resides. According to the petition, Blair was terminated “on bad terms” and supposedly left with “confidential information” belonging to the team and/or Snyder. The petition further alleges that Blair has an extensive criminal record including an embezzlement conviction, that she was working with “a third party” on articles harmful to Snyder, and spoke to other team employees about these issues.
Snyder’s Virginia filing makes clear that Snyder’s attorneys believe Blair is in the middle of damaging leaks, including the two defamatory meaww.com articles, but that she is not the end of the story. Snyder’s attorneys want to depose Blair and representatives of Comstock to determine the extent of Blair’s actions. As is the case with the Indian and California filings, any discovery recovered may not be filed in the public record and may thus be difficult to track. Stay with The Hog Sty for further information.