Kasowitz Protects Client’s Right to Speak Up Against Antisemitism at Stanford

Kasowitz Benson Torres, on behalf of Kevin Feigelis, a post-doctoral physics researcher at Stanford University, successfully moved to strike defamation and other claims brought against him and others by Ameer Hasan Loggins, a former lecturer at Stanford, after Feigelis had testified in February 2024 before a bipartisan roundtable of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education & the Workforce concerning antisemitism at Stanford.  In Mr. Feigelis’s written testimony to the Committee, he included a reference to allegations regarding Loggins whom Stanford had placed on leave while it investigated allegations that he discriminated against Jewish students in his class three days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. 
 
In granting the motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which bars lawsuits attacking legitimate free-speech activity, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, held that Mr. Feigelis’s congressional testimony is protected speech under California’s anti-SLAPP statute and absolutely privileged under California and District of Columbia law and observed that Loggins “has no probability of prevailing on his defamation claim against Defendants as a matter of law.” 
  
The Kasowitz team representing Mr. Feigelis was led by partners Andrew L. Schwartz, Joshua E. Roberts, and Jason S. Takenouchi, special counsel Léa Dartevelle Erhel, and includes associates Michael D. Fuzaylov, Emily A. Lowe, William Wolfe Taub, and Erin Ringel.