Orland Park and Chicago, IL. (ECWd) –
Federal Judge John J. Tharp Jr. filed an Order on September 23, 2015 granting Kleinman’s Motion to Dismiss due to jurisdictional issues.
“Defendant Dan Kleinman’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction [39] is granted without prejudice.”
“…the motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction is granted. Because the Court has concluded that it lacks jurisdiction over Kleinman, there is no basis to consider his challenges to the sufficiency of the allegations against him to state a claim.”
“Moreover, to the extent Bittman is attempting to base personal jurisdiction on a theory of joint activity, she wholly fails to address the question whether Illinois endorses the conspiracy theory of personal jurisdiction. …the theory may not be valid in
Illinois.”
This jurisdiction issue is another clue that this is a SLAPP lawsuit from the beginning. Trained attorneys had to have known that Dan Kleinman would be dismissed from this case at some point, because they didn’t bother to do the diligence of ensuring the court had jurisdiction over him or making a compelling argument that Kleinman could be sued in this jurisdiction. No effort was made in that regard.
One of the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit is that they are filed by public employees without any intention of seeing the lawsuit through to a trial. The SLAPPs are filed knowing that they will be dismissed at some point in the discovery process. The purpose of a SLAPP suit is just to file a lawsuit against someone, scare that person, and put a chill on that person’s free speech and make the person afraid of talking about or writing about the person who filed the lawsuit.
So, the plaintiff seemingly knows she doesn’t have a case and that at some point a judge is going to dismiss all this, but she files the lawsuit anyway just because it will make the targets have to hire attorneys, go through the stress of being sued, take time away from other things to address the bogus SLAPP suit, and possibly be afraid from writing about or speaking out about the public body where she worked.
This is my opinion of why Dan Kleinman was included in this SLAPP suit even though he lived in New Jersey. It is likely that Bittman knew Kleinman would be dismissed, but that the whole point of suing him was just to scare him and silence him and make him hire an attorney and all of that. That’s why SLAPPs are abuses of the process. The court system is not meant to be a means by which you can scare someone away who has been critical of you as a public employee.
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[gview file=”https://edgarcountywatchdogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-09-23-Order-Granting-Kleinmans-Motion-to-Dismiss.pdf”]
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7 Comments
Ilovejustice
Posted at 15:24h, 23 SeptemberWhere’s Mitch? Didn’t he proclaim that Dan Kleinman would have to pay thousands of dollars to Bittman? Sorry Mitch.
jmkraft
Posted at 15:50h, 23 SeptemberLOL – Mitch is busy pulling that foot out of his mouth…
PERSPECTiVE
Posted at 18:07h, 23 SeptemberI saw on the ALA Think Tank Facebook group that members of the American Library Association started that GoFundMe account to fund this lawsuit. You remember. It is the GoFundMe page that falsely claimed Bittman was desperate for money at the same time she was jetting off to Florida for a spring break vacation. If Kleinman is the big critic of the ALA and there is proof that the ALA members got together to fund a lawsuit against him I think that shows that the purpose of this lawsuit was to shut Kleinman up and scare him away. I feel the ALA has used this lawsuit as a proxy fight against Kleinman.
Mitch
Posted at 20:42h, 23 SeptemberSue him in the correct jurisdiction then. Problem solved.
jmkraft
Posted at 20:57h, 23 SeptemberIt is still a SLAPP – it just hasn’t gone far enough to be declared one…yet.
Beelady33
Posted at 22:00h, 23 Septemberyou just don’t know when you’re beat. sad.
PERSPECTiVE
Posted at 23:36h, 23 SeptemberShe has more problems to fix than the jurisdictional one. The judge just didn’t have to go any further to dismiss this. Bittman’s attorneys did not even bother to argue that Kleinman should be under the jurisdiction of this Illinois district court. That’s telling. It seems like the whole point of suing Kleinman was just to sue him and not to intend to prevail on anything. She just sued him to inconvenience or scare him. If you look at the actual counts she made against him they are all slapped-together and poorly reasoned and argued. It’s a very amateur hour complaint with no basis in reality. It seems unlikely she would be able to cure all the problems with this suit. She booked herself passage on the Titanic.