Not surprisingly, plaintiff sues as a Doe, since plaintiff wants to remain confidential and not let the world know there are naked/sex pictures out there. In California, there's an express statute that -- for good reason -- allows such claims to be filed as a Doe. But the trial court finds out that the clerk has accidentally posted Doe's real name on a publicly-available document -- a mistake not of Doe, but of the court -- so says that Doe can't use a pseudonym anymore, since the cat's out of the bag.
The Court of Appeal reverses. Rightly so, in my view. It's a short opinion. That's all it takes. The fact that a clerk made a (reversible) mistake doesn't justify forcing Doe to make everything public at this point. Instead, you should taken the mistakenly-published document off the court's web site and continue to let plaintiff use the word Doe.
Yep.
One last thing, that might be a tiny bit surprising.
Defendant's Nikolay's first name is Poulet. She's a woman. And plaintiff is a John Doe. So it's the guy in this case that doesn't want his naked/sex pictures circulated by a woman.
Not what you might have first thought, eh?
Not that that's at all relevant to the merits of the case, of course. But I bet those particular gender roles are the minority of these types of cases.
