Sometimes that's easy, since some justices have very unique writing styles. But most of the time -- at least if you don't take a peek at which division the case comes from (which I usually don't) -- you simply read the opinion on its merits, and don't discover until the end whether it's written by a justice about whom you have a particular opinion.
I say all this as an introduction to this opinion. Which, appropriately enough, was the last published Court of Appeal opinion in 2025.
It's very smart. Very well written. It's an appeal of an anti-SLAPP motion filed in response to a lawsuit for defamation and breach of contract that was filed by a "motivational speaker
to intermediate and high school students" whom the defendant stopped promoting as a speaker after "a member of a church youth
group . . . accused him of engaging in an
inappropriate sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student in the group." The trial court denied the motion, and the Court of Appeal reverses in part.
When I finished reading the opinion, I saw that its author was Justice Bromberg. Which made sense to me, since I almost always find his opinions both persuasive and smartly written. (With full disclosure that I worked alongside Justice Bromberg for a brief period when he was in private practice.) So this was just another data point in that regard -- and an unbiased one, since I came to that conclusion even before I discovered that he was the author.
All that said, as I read the opinion, I did have two somewhat orthogonal thoughts about it that I thought might be worth sharing.
First, I found it interesting that the Court of Appeal allowed "John Doe" to participate anonymously. I assume that the trial court allowed Doe to file his lawsuit anonymously, and that no party apparently objected to anonymous participation on appeal. But (1) I think that the Court of Appeal has (or at least should have) an independent obligation to decide whether anonymity is appropriate, and (2) I'm not at all confident that anonymity is appropriate here.
Doe decided to file a lawsuit. Those lawsuits are presumptively public. For good reason. Moreover, as many California courts have noted, “the right to access court proceedings necessarily includes
the right to know the identity of the parties.” So to hide your name from the public as part of your lawsuit, there's got to be a very good reason. You're a minor. You're a victim of sexual assault. You genuinely fear violence in response. Something like that.
The "John Doe" here doesn't seem to me to have any of that. He's someone who's accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a minor. He's the alleged perpetrator, not the victim. I understand that he might well not want his name out there in that regard. But the same is true for virtually every single criminal defendant -- as well as the vast majority of civil defendants (alongside many plaintiffs). We generally don't think that reputational harm is sufficient. At all.
Just six weeks ago, Justice Richardson published a lengthy opinion that explored at length the issue of when litigants should be permitted to litigate anonymously, and was persuasively critical of the practice. The desire for anonymity was even greater in that case than it is in this one, and yet the Court of Appeal refused to allow anonymous participation. This seemed to me a topic that Justice Bromberg might well have wanted to at least address in his opinion.
It's perhaps understandable that the Court of Appeal here simply went along with anonymity since none of the parties objected to it. But it'll often be the case that both parties desire anonymity, even when it is unwarranted. The plaintiff understandably doesn't want to publicize the scandalous accusations against him. And the defendant might have similar interests, since it might well fear lawsuits (or other negative reactions) to publicizing the name of someone who allegedly led a church group and engaged in sexual misconduct with minors. So we can't necessarily rely on the parties (or trial court) to accurately decide whether anonymity is warranted. I think there's a sua sponte obligation in this regard in the Court of Appeal as well.
I also thought that the decision to allow Doe to participate in an appeal anonymously was especially troubling given some of the things that the Court of Appeal expressly found in its opinion. Here's how Justice Bromberg described the underlying facts:
"[T]he independent investigator hired by CADA uncovered persuasive evidence of
misconduct by Doe. As the investigation showed, Doe’s own books admitted that he had
been a pastor at a church more than two decades ago, that he had an affair, and that his
wife left him as result—facts that the witnesses interviewed confirmed. In addition, the
four witnesses interviewed provided a consistent, and credible, account of Doe’s
misconduct. All four told the interviewer that in the 1990s Doe had used another name
and that he had been a church youth group leader. Three said that Doe’s affair with a
student was widely known, and a slightly different set of three said that, after Doe
resigned from the church, the student went to stay with Doe in Hawaii for two weeks.
Two witnesses said that Doe’s wife, who apparently had met him while she was a student
and he a teacher, left him because of the affair, and Doe’s successor as youth group
leader said that Doe renounced his ordination rather than submit to a redemption process
that included an investigation. And one witness said that, several years ago, he was asked
to book Doe as a speaker, but told his principal that they should not because Doe had
been 'in a statutory rape relationship' and 'can’t be around our students.'"
Not only are those fairly egregious (alleged) facts, but the Court of Appeal's own opinion on the anti-SLAPP motion held -- persuasively -- that there was a substantial public interest in the dissemination of those allegations by defendant. To quote Justice Bromberg (with emphasis added): "As Doe regularly spoke to students
at schools, camps, and conferences, and claimed to have engaged in thousands of intimate
conversations with teens, it is a matter of public interest whether Doe previously engaged
in improper sexual relations with a minor.
. . . Doe regularly spoke to intermediate and high school students, he claimed to
regularly conduct one-on-one interviews with students, and his website included
language that may be considered to involve grooming or be predatory. As a
consequence, Doe still presents a sufficient potential danger to students to create a public
interest in his previous misconduct."
If Doe indeed "still presents a sufficient potential danger to students" given his current activities, it's hard to see why it advances the public interest to keep his identity secret, much less why his private interest in this regard outweighs the strong presumption against public access.
Long story short: I thought that the Court of Appeal might well seriously consider not keeping Doe's name confidential in this appeal.
One other, final, tiny point as well.
Doe had been accused of "grooming and statutorily raping [a] 17-year-old student," and on appeal, Doe criticized the independent investigator hired by defendant for failing to interview this alleged victim. As brief background, the Court of Appeal explained that the interim head of the youth group had told the investigator that "Doe’s relationship with the 17-year-old student was not a secret among
the students, and he confirmed that, after resigning, Doe spent two weeks with the student
in Hawaii at a property that parishioners allowed the church to use." The Court of Appeal explained that, given these facts, it was "not surprising" that the investigator didn't interview the minor, and I mostly agree with that. I'm not sure how it advances the ball to potentially traumatize an alleged minor victim by going over the events surrounding the alleged "grooming and statutory rap[e]" of that minor given the evidence that already existed about these events. So on this score, yes, I agree.
That's also particularly true here because the parents of the minor here apparently had precisely the same reaction. Justice Bromberg notes early in the opinion that after the discovery of the events at issue and the conclusion of the investigation, "at the request of the student’s family, the church did not report Doe to law
enforcement." Okay. The parents quite understandably wanted to protect their child. That's their job. That was their call. Maybe it was right; maybe it was wrong. People could well disagree about the wisdom of that approach. It is what it is.
But what struck me about this issue is the language that Justice Bromberg uses on page 23 of his opinion, where he says: "Moreover, in light of the evidence that the family of
the student with whom Doe had an affair sought to cover up the affair, it is not surprising
that the investigator did not interview the student." I would not have used the words "cover up." I found that phrase inappropriate. I don't think that a refusal to report someone to the police constitutes covering up a crime. Particularly when that crime directly involves your minor child.
I know of plenty of crimes. I'm not obligated to report any of them. While I can't destroy evidence, in my eyes, it's not anything approaching a "cover up" to want to protect my child, or to not want them to have to recount the details of their (alleged) victimization again and again. That's a parental call, and to use the pejorative term "cover up" for that decision seemed both unnecessary and inapt.
I would replace those two words with something like "not further recount the details." It means the same thing. Without the starkly negative implications.
