The country’s largest Muslim civil liberties group must hand over its donor list as part of a sweeping set of documents it must disclose in an ongoing federal defamation suit filed by a former senior leader-turned-suburban city council member.
Lori Saroya, now serving on the Blaine City Council, sued the national Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in January — two years after the group dropped its own defamation lawsuit against her. A subsequent CAIR news release prompted Saroya’s follow-up suit, and now appears to have exposed the organization to a vast list of information to furnish.
Late last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz ordered CAIR to turn over most of the discovery Saroya sought as part of her lawsuit. In his ruling, Schultz described how a CAIR news release in which it claimed to have “proved” improper conduct by Saroya — despite having dismissed its case — “opened the door” to a deeper probe of its original case’s merits.
“Though CAIR objects to the broad discovery Saroya seeks, that breadth is a self-inflicted wound occasioned by its own press release,” Schultz wrote. “In commenting on the merits of the 2021 lawsuit in the manner in which it did, CAIR resuscitated the very issues that had just been laid to rest.”
Zachary Alter, an attorney representing CAIR, had argued in a court memo that Saroya was trying “to blur the lines between the 2021 and current lawsuits” to obtain “documents that she hopes will substantiate the hundreds of allegations she has been making against CAIR for eight years and provide additional fodder for additional future statements.”
Schultz was unmoved: CAIR’s position might be more persuasive, he responded, had CAIR’s news release merely outlined the procedural history and significance of the rulings in the 2021 litigation.
“Instead, CAIR stated that ‘[Saroya] was not able to defeat our lawsuit ... [which] allowed us to prove her conduct,’ and that ‘we have already proven those facts,’” Schultz pointed out. “A fair reading of the press release, particularly by a lay audience, would permit the reader to infer that Saroya had committed a crime, had defamed CAIR, had interfered with its business and breached her nondisclosure agreement.”
Jeff Robbins, an attorney representing Saroya, told the Minnesota Star Tribune this week that Schultz’s order “was extremely closely reasoned, meticulous and record-based.”