An attorney for The Washington Post said the decisions affected the newspaper’s contents and therefore entitle the paper to an expedited dismissal under the speech-protection measure. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
03/18/2022 01:46 PM EDT
The Washington Post is wielding a law aimed at protecting free and open debate on public controversies to throw out a lawsuit brought by one of its own reporters claiming she was discriminated against because of her status as a sexual assault victim.
A District of Columbia Superior Court judge conducted hourlong arguments Friday on the Post’s unusual bid to use a district statute known as the anti-SLAPP law to dismiss the case filed last July by writer Felicia Sonmez over the newspaper’s decision to block her from covering sexual-assault-related stories.
The Post’s editors said the restrictions were due to her public statements about her own experiences with an alleged assault by another reporter while working in China, but Sonmez’s suit contends that the Post subjected her to a double-standard as a woman and as a crime victim, categories specifically protected by the district’s anti-discrimination law.
An attorney for the Post, Jacob Roth, said the decisions affected the newspaper’s contents and therefore entitle the paper to an expedited dismissal under the speech-protection measure, which takes its name from an acronym for strategic lawsuits against public participation.
“The bans are decisions by the editors at the Post...
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