SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The Ninth Circuit ruled Monday that San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston was legally allowed to block a conservative journalist’s publication from his Twitter account.
Susan Reynolds sued Preston in 2022, claiming he violated her First Amendment rights when he blocked her publication, The Marina Times, from his public Twitter account in 2020. Reynolds said that Preston blocked her because she was critical of his policies to cut funding to police and prisons.
“Supervisor Preston has long maintained a grudge against Ms. Reynolds, largely borne out of his anger about Ms. Reynolds’ criticism of Supervisor Preston’s policy stances (namely his ‘movement goals’ of defunding the police and abolishing prisons),” Reynolds said in the complaint. “Supervisor Preston tried (and failed) to exclude Ms. Reynold’s publication from a city-funded advertising program, and he has done little to hide his contempt for Ms. Reynolds.”
Preston said he blocked The Marina Times not because of criticism, but because of a June 2020 tweet in which Preston said Reynolds threatened himself and his family.
In that Tweet, Reynolds asked Person if he had a child. Then she tweeted: “Hope he doesn’t let them out at night by themselves after he gets rid of the entire SFPD and abolishes prisons.” The second tweet was punctuated with the hashtag #PrestonsPurge.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick refused to dismiss Reynolds’ suit, but the appeals court panel, made up of U.S. Circuit Judges Lucy Koh, Holly Thomas and Roopali Desai, all Joe Biden appointees, ruled that Preston was speaking for himself, and not the city, when he blocked Reynolds’ publication.
The ruling cited a unanimous Supreme Court decision from March in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett said public officials were bound by the First Amendment when acting on behalf of the government but that they are also private citizens with constitutional rights, including the right to free speech.
Barrett said in the ruling that a public official is only speaking on behalf of the government when they are making official announcements authorized by law, or when they indicate that they are speaking as an authority or elected official.
Because there was “no clearly established law” that Preston was acting on behalf of the government when he blocked Reynolds, and no clearly established violation of Reynolds’ First Amendment rights, the suit against him must be remanded back to Orrick with instructions to permanently dismiss the case, the appeals panel ruled.
“Reynolds attempted to incite violence against my family and then hired a Trump lawyer to file a lawsuit to further harass me,” Preston said in a statement. “I’m grateful that the appellate court followed the law and directed the dismissal of this frivolous case, which never should have been brought in the first place.”
Reynolds argued that the case should be judged by the legal standards in effect in 2020, when she originally sued the supervisor, but the appeals panel said the legal standard cited in her suit had been clearly revoked by the Supreme Court’s March ruling.
“At the trial court level, Judge Orrick rejected Supervisor Preston’s argument that he was immune from suit. After the Supreme Court changed the governing standard this past March, the Ninth Circuit concluded Supervisor Preston was immune solely because the law was not clearly established,” Jesse Franklin-Murdock, an attorney for Reynolds, wrote in a statement. “We disagree with the panel’s direction to dismiss the case as there are still claims for injunctive and declaratory relief that have not been adjudicated, and we intend to seek prompt relief regarding that matter. We therefore do not consider the case over by any means.