Appeals court gives Leah Remini’s defamation suit against Church of Scientology another trim

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Actress Leah Remini’s lawsuit against the Church of Scientology for harassment and defamation will survive, following a ruling by the state court of appeals Friday.Remini’s long complaint was given a significant trim by a superior court judge in 2024, who agreed to strike about half the defamation claims on First Amendment grounds, following an anti-SLAPP ruling filed by the Church. The judge also struck a handful of claims for falling outside the statute of limitations, but the harassment claims were left untouched. Both parties appealed.On Friday, a three-judge panel mostly agreed with the lower court, but it ordered the court to strike an additional dozen or so individual statements. For example, it ruled Remini can’t sue over being called an “unhinged religious bigot” or “a one-woman hate machine.”The panel did, however, find the lower court erred when it struck certain claims for being time-barred. While certain statements against Remini, such as when she was called a “liar,” were in fact made in early 2022, they were made again on Twitter later that year, effectively restarting the statute of limitations clock. Those three claims are now revived.In an email, the church’s attorney, Jasjaap Sidhu, declared victory, writing: “The trial court gutted Leah Remini’s lawsuit. After today’s Court of Appeal opinion, that lawsuit barely exists. The Church of Scientology defeated the vast majority of the allegations it challenged, and it successfully defended its First Amendment right to express its opinions, including that Remini incited hate and violence against Scientologists, and that she filed a false police report and attempted to extort the Church. The church looks forward to recovering its anti-SLAPP attorneys’ fees and defeating the few baseless allegations that remain.”Remini’s attorney, Daniel Saunders, saw the upside in the ruling.“After years of delay caused by Scientology’s appeal, the Court of Appeal today allowed Leah Remini’s defamation case to proceed," he wrote. “We look forward to finally getting into discovery and then holding the defendants liable for their conduct in a court of law.”The former “King of Queens” actress publicly broke with the Church in 2013, after nearly 40 years of membership and spending more than $5 million on classes, services and donations to the organization. She became one of Scientology’s most vocal and high-profile critics, penning a memoir, participating and in a TV docuseries and hosting a podcast, all excoriating the church.The church responded in kind, producing a slew of videos and articles attacking Remini as a racist and accusing her of inspiring hate crimes against its members. The headline of one article read: “As the World Remembers the Holocaust, Bigot Leah Remini Inspires Praise of Hitler.”According to Remini and other former Scientologists, the actress was declared a “suppressive person,” which in church parlance means she is to be shunned by all its members, including her parents, who still belong to the church. Remini says she was declared “fair game,” and made the target of harassment and the subject of an online disparagement campaign. Even her estranged family took part in the campaign, appearing in videos accusing Remini of abusing her half-sister and father, and of refusing to help pay for her father’s cancer treatments.She also accused the church of having her followed and surveilled by private detectives, a claim that was not brought up in the appeal.“For the past ten years, Ms. Remini has been stalked, surveilled, harassed, threatened, intimidated, and, moreover, has been the victim of intentional malicious and fraudulent rumors via hundreds of Scientology-controlled and coordinated social media accounts that exist solely to intimidate and spread misinformation," Remini wrote in her complaint.Following the church’s anti-SLAPP motion, Superior Court Judge Randolph Hammock meticulously picked through the dense complaint and struck roughly half of the nearly 100 allegations, most for being statements of opinion and not assertions of fact, or for being too vague, or not having been made by the church.“None of these are actionable,” Hammock explained during a hearing in January. “They’re not very nice things to say about someone. They usually demonstrate malice when you call someone names. We know she’s not a Nazi. You guys call her a Nazi. That’s fine. That’s your right under the First Amendment. I understand. She attacks you. You attack her.”The appeals court struck an additional 14 or so claims for that same reason.As to the claim that the church said Remini was “abusive to her mother and daughter," the appellate panel found that Remini had failed to show the church had actually made that statement. That claim will be removed from her complaint.Allegations about the church calling Remini “a one-woman hate machine” and a “disgrace to women of valor everywhere” will also be stricken. So, too, will a claim over the church’s statement that Remini filed a “false police report and then attempt[ed] to extort Scientology," because Remini did in fact file a report with the LAPD which investigated and, Judge Elwood Lui wrote, “determined that the subject was not missing or in harm’s way.”“Although Defendants could have chosen more appropriate words than ‘false’ and ’extort’ in describing these incidents, their strained use of language does not give rise to a viable defamation claim,” wrote Lui. “Defendants’ statements possiblyexaggerated and overdramatized the events, but Remini failed to demonstrate that they were false, actionable statements of fact.”The panel also revived three claims for not having been time-barred after all.The case will now proceed to discovery and then trial.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads