Anti-SLAPP protection

North Carolina does not have an anti-SLAPP statute.

Helpful cases

North Carolina courts have only once, in passing, mentioned the term “SLAPP.” While North Carolina has no anti-SLAPP statute, these cases offer insight into how state courts have interpreted frivolous cases against publishers.

Daniels v. Metro Magazine Holding Company (2006)

The lawsuit focuses on an article published in Metro Magazine that focused on an editor’s experience with Sibil Lindsey Daniels, an insurance adjuster for Progressive, after his car was stolen and wrecked. Daniels sued the publication and the editor on three claims, including libel. The trial court granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit under G.S. § 1A-1, Rule 12(b)(6), which includes a failure to state a legitimate claim. The trial court’s decision was affirmed by the court of appeals. In its decision, the court found the majority of the contested statements were “clearly matters of personal opinion, or alternatively, hyperbole no reasonable reader would believe.” The court continued, the story is a “highly individualized, personal interpretation tainted by [the editor’s] own emotions, rather than a journalistic, factual recounting of events.” The court took the editor’s “open and obvious emotion and irrationality, combined with the absurd tone of the piece,” to conclude that a reader would understand the piece to be the editor’s interpretation of what happened.

LaComb v. Jacksonville Daily News Company (2001)

Daniel and Gail LaComb sued the Jacksonville Daily News after an article reported that the LaCombs had been charged with misdemeanor counts of “contributing to the delinquency of two minors.” The plaintiffs filed a defamation action alleging the article wrongly suggested the arrest was for sexual activity with the two minors. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the newspaper. The decision was affirmed by a court of appeals, which held that the reporting of the arrests was “substantially accurate” under the conditional “fair report privilege.” The court of appeals acknowledged the arrest warrant to be “somewhat ambiguous,” and that “taken as a whole, the newspaper article is a substantially accurate report of the allegations in the arrest warrant.”

Proffitt v. Greensboro News & Record, Inc (1988)

A newspaper editorial accusing Proffitt, a former sheriff, of openly lying. Proffitt had recently been a subject of a state investigation into his alleged agreement to perform favors for an inmate in exchange for sex with the inmate’s girlfriend. In several stories in the Greensboro News & Record, the publication repeated the statement that the plaintiff denied having sex with the woman. A month after the investigation, Proffitt gave a press conference and released a statement in which he denied doing favors for the inmate, but “did not specifically deny having sex” with the girlfriend. When he later testified in a criminal trial for bribery, he admitted to having sex but denied it being tied to favors to the inmate. He was found to be not guilty. A day later, the paper published an editorial calling for the removal of Proffitt that alleged the sheriff “openly lied to the public” when he “initially denied either having sex with the woman or performing favors for the inmate.” After the newspaper denied a request for a retraction, the plaintiff sued for defamation. Proffitt argued he denied having sex “in exchange for favors” and referenced a previous editorial in the newspaper to show the paper knew he had not denied having sex with the woman. The trial court granted summary judgment for the defendants. The opinion was supported by a court of appeals. In its opinion, judges focused on the significance of the word “initially” and reference how other published articles in the paper reported on Proffitt. They ruled that “at most, there is a conflict in the evidence as to whether the plaintiff initially denied having sex” with the woman, but that it did not constitute actual malice.

Legislation

There have been a few attempts to introduce an anti-SLAPP bill modeled after the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. In 2023, House Bill 144 was approved by the Judiciary 1 Committee, before dying in the Rules Committee. A similar bill, House Bill 1017, died in 2022.

Additional

While North Carolina doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP statute, other statutes may provide some assistance to those facing frivolous suits. For example, NC. GS § 1D-45 allows the court to award attorneys’ fees against someone who files a claim for punitive damages when they know it or “should have known” it to be frivolous or malicious.