The global campaign of billionaire-backed strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP suits) targeting independent media is not about defamation. It is about breaking media and media criticism.
A new set of cases in a billionaire’s forum of choice — the UK (and US) courts — threatens to bankrupt some of the world’s leading independent investigative journalism networks.
Two not-for-profit investigative journalism organisations facing writs in the UK, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have told The Guardian that the writs were “potentially financially ruinous” and the cost of defending them could wipe out all their funding.
For SLAPP-happy billionaire litigants targeting independent journalism, that’s a feature, not a bug.
London’s The Daily Telegraph is also being sued in the British courts. Meanwhile, a parallel case has been launched in the US against the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an initiative of the Journalism Development Network run jointly out of Maryland in the US and Bucharest in Romania.
The cases are “a clear attempt to intimidate independent investigative journalism”, openDemocracy’s editor-in-chief Peter Geoghegan told The Guardian. “We are a small, not-for-profit media organisation being threatened by rich and powerful organisations for reporting on what we believe is in the public interest.”
The cases are being brought by Jusan Technologies and the Nazarbayev Fund, a private fund named for the former long-term president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, over (incorrect and defamatory, per the lawyers) allegations of financial links between the two organisations and Nazarbayev and his family.
It’s not the first high-profile defamation case involving Kazakhstan. Tom Burgis and his publisher HarperCollins were sued (largely unsuccessfully) in the British courts over his book Kleptopia, which investigated the laundering of corrupt dealings through the UK finance industry.
Burgis (like author Catherine Belton who was sued over her related book, Putin’s People) had the benefit of having a billionaire-backed publisher in his corner through the Murdoch family’s controlling interest in HarperCollins’ parent company, News Corp.
Most SLAPP-ed media aren’t so lucky. Writs tend to be targeted at individual journalists and small, often start-up media for whom the cases can quickly escalate to the existential. It’s the imbalance of power in action: for the billionaire, a set-and-forget handballing of responsibility to the lawyers; for small media, they’re time-consuming, money-eating and soul-destroying.
Around the world, SLAPPs come hand in hand with oligarchs and rising authoritarianism.
Yevgeny Prigozhin — the oligarch’s oligarch (most recently seen recruiting prisoners from Russia’s jails to fight in Ukraine) and head of mercenary Wagner Group — used the UK courts to sue journalist Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source media Bellingcat. The writ went after Higgins personally over tweets linking to articles in The Insider and Der Spiegel. The case was struck out in May due to non-compliance with court orders by then sanctioned Prigozhin.
While the British and US cases (and some here in Australia) get the publicity, it’s in the global south where the damage SLAPP-based defamation does to democracy is clearest. A 2020 study by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law found that about 88% of cases it surveyed were wholly or partly based on defamation, including some on criminal defamation (still on the books as a crime in Australia too).
In Brazil, under President Jair Bolsonaro, writer João Paulo Cuenca calls it “Kafka in the tropics”; he has been sued 140 times after alleging advertising money was being funnelled by the Brazilian government to evangelical-owned media.
Bolsonaro supporter Luciano Hang — owner of the Havan retail chain and alliteratively tagged by Bloomberg as “Brazil’s brashest billionaire” — has initiated at least 37 cases in the past decade, according to a survey by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI).
In the Columbia Journalism Review, this month Joel Simon and Carlos Lauria concluded: “When it comes to SLAPPs, journalists and media outlets lose even when they win. Saddled with legal costs and lost hours, they may think twice before taking on the next critical investigation.
“In too many instances, the law has become an instrument of repression — and the public is left in the dark.”
