An appellate court ruled against Wade Major, who sued political activist Ozzie Silna to stop him from spending more than $100 per city council candidates’ campaigns in the 2004 race.
By Jonathan Friedman / Assistant Editor
Property rights advocate Wade Major could be getting a large bill from one of his political opponents. An appellate court ruled Tuesday that Major must pay political activist Ozzie Silna’s attorney fees for a 2004 lawsuit involving that year’s City Council election campaign.
“We are very pleased and our client is very pleased that his rights have been vindicated,” said Abraham M. Rudy, Silna’s attorney.
Rudy said during a Tuesday afternoon interview that he had just received the court decision and had not read it and declined to comment further.
Silna had also not read the decision as of Tuesday afternoon and would not comment on the case.
Major, too, had not read the decision, but called the suit “spiteful.”
“Ozzie said in an earlier article that he was continuing the lawsuit out of principal,” Major said. “You’re talking about a man whose unprecedented spending [in the 2004 City Council election campaign] elevated the sleaze factor to something Malibu had never seen before. So I don’t know what his principals are.”
In March 2004, Major filed a suit against Silna to prevent him from spending more than $100 per candidate in the council campaign. Major alleged that because Silna had sent out a letter in support of specific candidates and had attended a candidate informational session on behalf of one of them, he was directly involved in their campaigns. If one is directly involved in a candidate’s campaign, city law prohibits that person from spending more than the $100 threshold for the campaign.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Terry Friedman ruled against Major because he said Major had not provided enough evidence that Silna was directly involved in the candidates’ campaigns, and that even if it were true, the city code provided an opportunity for Major to bring his complaint to a city prosecutor.
Silna later sued for attorney fees. But Friedman did not grant them, saying that Major had the right to try to correct what he believed was a violation of a campaign finance law.
The three-judge panel from the Court of Appeal’s 2nd District overturned Friedman’s decision based on a state law that is designed to protect people from being sued for politically strategic reasons, what is known as the anti-SLAPP law.
Major had argued that law did not apply to his situation because of an exception in the law that exempts suits that were made in the public interest. He cited his public interest was to prevent somebody from violating the city’s campaign finance laws since City Attorney Christi Hogin had written in signed statement to the court that the city of Malibu would not have been able to act on a complaint from Major prior to the election.
But the appellate court said Major did not qualify under the anti-SLAPP law’s exemption because the exemption could not be made for those suing people who wrote something in “an article published in a newspaper or magazine of general circulation.”
“We do not see any material distinction between Silna’s letter-which advocated support for the candidates on the basis of their political positions, and was distributed by mail in Malibu-and an article or editorial of similar length and content in a newspaper or magazine circulated generally in Malibu,” wrote Associate Justice Daniel A. Curry.
Curry further wrote that Major could not claim to have been working in the public interest because city law dictates that a city prosecutor must deal with campaign finance issues, rather than a private citizen.
The court ruled that the case must go back to the Los Angeles Superior Court to determine how much money Major must pay Silna. Silna’s original request was for $60,000. But Rudy said the number will be higher once the costs of the appeal are calculated.
Major said he had not decided if he would try to bring the case to the California Supreme Court. He added that he still feels he did the right thing to file his original suit against Silna, despite the financial burden it might have caused.