A new court ruling is allowing a journalist's defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast to move forward to discovery.
Former Gawker editorial editor Carson Griffith filed the suit against the liberal blog in 2020 regarding a January 2019 report she alleges resulted in losing her job after staffers turned on her.
Griffith, who was hired by Gawker in 2018 as part of the site's relaunch, also claims it has been difficult to continue her media career because the story quickly turns up when her name is searched online.
Justice Lori Stattler of the New York Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Griffith after a New York judge previously dismissed a motion filed by the Daily Beast to toss the lawsuit.
NEW YORK JUDGE DENIES DAILY BEAST MOTION TO DISMISS FORMER GAWKER EDITOR'S DEFAMATION LAWSUIT
"The fact that our original argument against retroactive application of the anti-SLAPP (Anti-Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statute has been vindicated is certainly nice, although this was never a SLAPP suit. The main thing is that we're eager to get this litigation back on track," Griffith's attorney Ron Coleman told Fox News Digital.
JOURNALIST SUES DAILY BEAST OVER 'DEFAMATORY AND UNTRUTHFUL STATEMENTS'
"A judge has already found that I’ve sufficiently pled a cause of action for defamation. Anti-SLAPP laws are meant to prevent rich and powerful plaintiffs from using frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt our press with legal fees. They are not meant to give rich and powerful media companies impunity to bankrupt victims of defamation," Griffith said in a statement.
The Daily Beast did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
The lawsuit names The Daily Beast, former Daily Beast editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman and former Daily Beast reporter Maxwell Tani as defendants (Shachtman is now the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone magazine and Tani has since joined Politico as a White House reporter).
Griffith's complaint alleges Tani never asked Griffith for comment and claimed the "primary source for this article was his close friend and former colleague" Maya Kosoff.
According to the article, Kosoff and one other reporter decided to leave Gawker when management refused to fire Griffith after the pair informed human resources they "felt personally uncomfortable working" under her after she made "offensive" workplace statements.
"Tani did not report these statements in good faith and acted with actual malice, due to only reporting partial sections of Slack conversations and email exchanges that benefited Ms. Kosoff, his primary source, thus forwarding his personal agenda to make Ms. Griffith look racist, homophobic and transphobic," the complaint said.
Griffith said that the Beast "purposely yanked my words out of context to create an absolutely false narrative."
The complaint detailed Griffith’s claim that Tani used selectively chosen and out-of-context emails and Slack messages to make her appear racist and homophobic. Griffith’s former employer, Gawker parent BDG Media, hired an outside law firm to conduct an independent investigation into the claims that deemed the allegations to be false, according to the complaint.
The complaint also says Tani was aware that the investigation cleared Griffith’s name but "did not look into updating, changing or further investigating his defamatory article" or the "extreme claims" he made about her.
The Daily Beast’s story noted that "two reporters said they decided to leave the new Gawker after Bustle Digital Group—which bought the shuttered Gawker.com domain and its archives in a mid-2018 fire sale—refused to oust Griffith over offensive workplace comments about everything from poor people to [B]lack writers to her acquaintance’s penis size."
However, the complaint states: "Griffith never made comments about ‘penis size,’ ‘poor people,’ or ‘[B]lack writers’" and the Beast can’t prove otherwise. The complaint also claimed that the Beast falsely indicated that Griffith "seemed to brag to Gawker staff that she had gotten them out of a company-wide diversity training session."
The complaint added that "Tani’s statement is defamatory, as it is made with actual malice" because the messages reviewed didn’t mention a diversity training session.
"Tani tried to purposely frame this as if Ms. Griffith is racist and negligent to diversity in the workplace," the complaint said.
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.
