(Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images)
On December 16, Donald Trump filed his latest harassing trollsuit against a media company that said mean words that hurt his feelings. This time the target was Iowa pollster J. Anne Selzer, who projected that Vice President Harris would take the state by three points, a 16-point whiff. Trump sued her, along with the Des Moines Register and its parent company Gannett Co., under the state’s consumer protection statute, his favorite “one weird trick” to get around the First Amendment.
But it turns out Trump was so busy enjoying all that delicious earned media that he forgot to serve all the defendants at once. Whoopsie doodle! And so Gannett used one weird trick of its own to get out of the District Court for Polk County, Iowa. And this trick is actually based on real law, not just rebranding your SLAPP suit as a consumer fraud action and hoping you can force the victims to spend a shitload of cash before a judge tosses you out of court.
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Gannett’s “trick” is the forum defendant rule, 28 U.S.C. § 1441(b)(2), which allows for federal removal on the basis of diversity “if any of the parties in interest properly joined and served as defendants is a citizen of the State in which such action is brought.” Here, Trump’s MAGA lawyer filed the complaint on the 16th, and served Gannett the next day. But he apparently failed to “properly join and serve” any of the Iowa parties (Selzer, her company S&C, and the Register) at that time. And that meant that the Florida Man and Gannett (a Delaware company doing business in New York) were the only players officially on the field.
As trademark lawyer Mark Jaffe observed on Bluesky, this may explain Gannett’s refusal to publicly commit to funding Selzer’s legal defense.
“To remove this to federal court, Gannett relies on a doctrine which requires that Selzer hasn’t been served yet,” Jaffe noted. “Lawyers usually accept service on behalf of their client. If they accepted on behalf of Selzer, they couldn’t invoke this rule.”
And so, the Polk County clerk duly closed the case one day after opening it. Trump’s trollsuit has now been assigned to Judge Rebecca Ebinger of the Southern District of Iowa. Before Barack Obama elevated Judge Ebinger to the federal bench, she served as a state judge in Iowa, so she’ll be well placed to determine whether a newspaper article is “merchandise” for the purpose of Iowa’s consumer fraud statute.
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Trump v. Selzer [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.