May I Say Something?

My testimony to the Maryland State Legislature regarding anti-SLAPP legislation, why this blog has to be anonymous, and what they can do to free us

A SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) is a defamation lawsuit meant to intimidate you from speaking publicly on a certain subject. They are used by domestic abusers, those accused of sexual assault (especially at universities), and widely by business - such as developers who want to silence community members that oppose a new mall in their area. Over the past decades, states have passed anti-SLAPP laws to curb this misuse of the legal system, but they have proven too weak, and some legislatures are trying to fix them. This is the third year that a few Maryland state legislators are putting forward a bill to do just that, since it has failed to pass for the past two years. There is no national anti-SLAPP legislation. The following is testimony I am submitting to the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, where the legislation has died previously. We protect the free speech of pornographers and KKK members with zeal, but as a domestic violence survivor my writings/speech about my actual experiences are not protected by law, even if I do not name my abuser. Part of this testimony, like much of what I have experienced during and after the abuse, is a formal query to our society: What the hell?

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Like many other survivors of intimate partner violence I have been threatened with defamation lawsuits, which are intentionally weaponized by abusers to keep us from speaking about our own experiences, or using those experiences to educate others and advocate for policies which would better our society. This government-enabled form of legal abuse is intertwined with the financial cost of defense against civil action (no matter how frivolous), forming the rope that effectively strangles the 1^st Amendment rights of any victim whose abuser uses or threatens to use their participation in civil discourse against them. SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are one of many methods of perpetrator manipulation of the legal system to control and terrorize their target, frequently after separation.

By passing a favorable vote on SB 568 and giving teeth to Maryland’s anti-SLAPP statute, you have the opportunity to close an avenue of oppression, easily and without costing the State anything. You can return to me and thousands of others our basic rights to free expression as Americans.

I published a couple of short pieces in mainstream media outlets in 2021 on topics of general public interest from the point of view of a survivor, and wrote a blog. I have received formal letters threatening legal action for my truthful writings about abuse. Between that and media coverage of the risks of survivor voice, I have not published anything under my name since then – I’m now limited to an anonymous blog. Imagine all that society is not learning from survivors about what is really happening behind closed doors and how to solve it, because those who have actually lived it cannot participate in public discussion. Abusers do not give receipts for what they do in private, so the expected burden of proof in defamation suits is a purposeful trap in which we can become ensnared even if we never publicized the name of our abusers, and sometimes even if they’ve been convicted of some part of their acts.

By submitting this testimony under my name, I may be putting myself at legal risk, and there are countless others not testifying because of that risk. That is a reality that this legislation would rectify directly. In the book Down Girl (2018), Cornell University Professor Kate Manne wrote that manual strangulation, a common and especially dangerous form of intimate partner assault, results in a fear that leads to “testimonial smothering,” of which there are many forms:

You can stuff her mouth and cheeks full of deferential platitudes. You can threaten to make her eat certain words that she might say as a prophylactic against her testifying or so much as recognizing what is happening to her and others. You can make her utterances doomed to fail, less than hollow. You can train her not to say ‘strangle’ but rather ‘choke,’ or better yet ‘grab,’ or best of all nothing. It was nothing, nothing happened. (p. 5)

Judicial precedent calls power-based intimidation of free speech a “chilling effect,” which is just a gentler way of saying the same thing. I cannot tell you if I was strangled during abuse, or if I was beaten, or threatened with a gun, or sexually assaulted, or subjected to other types of legal abuse; the more serious the offense, the more legally dangerous it is for the victim to relate in public unless under oath.

For years I have been testimonially smothered by the possibility of malicious lawsuit. What happened to me is not only a personal problem - it is a public health syndrome that causes the death of half of the women murdered in the United States. Our country’s landmark free speech case, New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), was decided in a time when public speech mainly occurred through official media outlets, so that was the group the U.S. Supreme Court sought to protect from legal bullying. Those outlets are dwindling, and public discourse is now more direct and online. With a favorable vote on SB 568 the members of the Judicial Proceedings Committee can bring survivors of IPV/DV and sexual assault, as well as many other types of regular folk fighting the arrogant, powerful or unscrupulous, into the fold of the modern 1^st Amendment. We are only asking for the chance to speak for ourselves.

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To learn more about anti-SLAPP laws (which are state-based, not national), and find out how well your state protects you from malicious lawsuits, visit the Institute for Free Speech.

The National Women’s Law Center and Know Your IX: Survivors Speaking Out: A Toolkit About Defamation Lawsuits and Other Retaliation by and for People Speaking Out About Sex-Based Harassment.

To assist in the passage of SB568, email the chairmen of Maryland’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, just telling them that they have the duty to protect free speech without fear by passing anti-Slapp legislation. Senator Smith: will.smith@senate.state.md.us and Senator Waldstreicher: jeff.waldstreicher@senate.state.md.us. If you live in Maryland, please contact your state representatives - senators and delegates - to ask them to support the bill (it is called HB330 in the House). You can find your representatives based on your address here.

Thank you!