WWW- A privacy suit against a blogger should be dismissed because her explicit postings about an affair with a co-worker are a newsworthy portrayal of “casual sex among members of the political class in Washington,” her lawyers argue.
In a case that tests the limits of privacy in the Internet age, Jessica Cutler — aka “Washingtonienne” — claims she had a First Amendment right to “discuss her own personal sexual experiences” with Robert Steinbuch. The two of them had their affair while they both worked for Sen. Michael DeWine (R-Ohio).
“The interrelationship between youth, beauty, sex, money, and power in Washington has long been a matter of legitimate and sometimes pressing public interest,” defense counsel at Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe (Washington, D.C.) say in a motion to dismiss Steinbuch’s privacy suit.
But the plaintiff’s lawyers have responded that Cutler’s blog has no nexus to a newsworthy topic, noting that Cutler herself has said it is “really about a bunch of nobodies fucking each other.”
“If Cutler now claims that her recitation of private facts … is newsworthy, then no bureaucrat or employee in Washington, D.C. — indeed no person anywhere in the Country — would have a right to privacy,” they say in their opposition.
The pleadings raise several other tricky issues. Among them are whether
* Cutler “publicized” her private blog by declining to password protect it.
*Steinbuch had no “objectively reasonable” expectation of privacy because he “essentially knew nothing about Cutler before entering into sexual relations with her.”
*Cutler’s explicit revelations are really shocking “when viewed in the context” of contemporary America’s sex-saturated culture.
There’s also this one-of-a-kind footnote:
Read in context, Cutler’s comment that “we have nasty sex like animals, not man and wife” appears to reflect Cutler’s questioning of the nature of her relationship with Steinbuch, not an explicit description of sexual activity. It is therefore questionable whether this comment can even fairly be described as a fact.