An odd item appeared recently in the Washington Post — the judge hearing a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals against Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus has ordered the lawsuit file to be sealed and ordered PETA to remove a copy of the file from its web site.
This is odd because neither PETA nor Ringling Brothers requested that the case file be sealed. According to The Washington Post, in Virginia case are generally only sealed after one party or the other convinces a judge that there is a compelling reason to do so.
The lawsuit stems from claims that Kenneth Feld, president of Feld Entertainment which owns Ringling Brothers, conspired to infiltrate and disrupt PETA. Aside from everything else, you have to love the irony of PETA suing Ringling because Ringling allegedly sent someone in undercover to infiltrate PETA. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea.
Feld and associate Richard Froemming, who is also named in the lawsuit, filed a motion last year asking that allegations that Feld and Froemming engaged in theft and lies about PETA be stricken from the lawsuit. The judge rejected that motion, but ruled that since allegations were being made about individuals not formally named in the lawsuit, that the court had a
. . . compelling interest to ensure that nonparties, who really have no standing to protect themselves in the context of this litigation, receive that kind of attention from the court, and I find that sealing the court’s file is the least burdensome and most narrowly tailored way to do that.
PETA’s attorney Philip Hirschkop has filed an appeal with the Virginia State Supreme Court seeking to overturn the sealing of the case file, telling The Washington Post, “What the judge did is outrageous — there’s no basis for it.”
Source:
Fairfax Judge Seals File in PETA, Circus Suit. Tom Jackman, Washington Post, March 13, 2003.