Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
The Enquirer won the attorney's fees through the anti-SLAPP provision in California law. Normally losing plaintiffs do not have to pay attorneys fees in California.
Anti-SLAPP law exists to prevent frivolous lawsuits meant to discourage public discourse.
Specifically, it allows defendants to (somewhat) cheaply and easily get lawsuits against them dismissed, if the purpose of such lawsuit is simply to silence public speech which the plaintiff does not like. Even if the lawsuit appears to be about something else on its surface, if the subsequent discovery makes it likely that the lawsuit actually seeks to silence critical speech, Anti-SLAPP actions will cause the lawsuit to be dismissed.
California has especially strong anti-SLAPP statutes.
Nevada now also has strong anti-SLAPP statutes, which are based upon the much more extensive California statutes. A recent legal challenge to anti-SLAPP in Nevada was defeated.
Upon the dismissal of a lawsuit via an anti-SLAPP hearing, the plaintiff is responsible to pay all or most of the defendant's legal fees.
Since Simmons is a public figure, it is much tougher for him to claim libel. As a public figure, you can only successfully claim libel if it occurred with malice, meaning the defendant KNEW at the time he wrote the defamatory content that it was false. If the defendant erroneously thought it was true, and thus wrote incorrect and damaging things, the public figure could not win a libel case.
In this case, the Enquirer claimed it believed that what they wrote about Simmons was true at the time of the article, and also claimed that being transgender is not defamatory.
Since Simmons' lawsuit seeked to punish the Enquirer for publishing a story about him, it triggered the "free speech interference" requirement of anti-SLAPP, and thus the Enquirer won their attorney's fees.
With that said, this isn't really the intended usage of anti-SLAPP -- where deep-pocketed publications can force individuals to pay for their expensive in-house lawyers, after they write untrue gossip about them.
Anti-SLAPP was actually meant to do the reverse -- to protect individuals from large corporations or rich people from silencing them under the threat of a defamation/libel suit.