Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-14-07070/USCOURTS-caDC-14-07070-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Adam Leitman Bailey
Appellee
District of Columbia
Amicus Curiae for Appellee
Vincent Forras
Appellant
Larry Elliott Klayman
Appellant
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 7, 2015 Decided February 12, 2016

No. 14-7070

VINCENT FORRAS AND LARRY ELLIOTT KLAYMAN,

APPELLANTS

v.

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF AND ADAM LEITMAN BAILEY,

APPELLEES

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:12-cv-00282)

Larry Klayman argued the cause and filed the briefs for 

appellants.

Christopher G. Hoge argued the cause and filed the brief 

for appellee Adam Leitman Bailey.

Karl A. Racine, Attorney General for the Office of the 

District of Columbia, Ariel B. Levinson-Waldman, Senior 

Counsel to the Attorney General, Todd S. Kim, Solicitor 

General, and Loren L. AliKhan, Deputy Solicitor General, 

were on the brief for amicus curiae District of Columbia in 

support of appellees as to the applicability and 

constitutionality of the Anti-SLAPP Act. 

USCA Case #14-7070 Document #1598632 Filed: 02/12/2016 Page 1 of 14
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Before: MILLETT and PILLARD, Circuit Judges, and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge MILLETT.

MILLETT, Circuit Judge: The question in this case is 

whether the United States District Court for the District of 

Columbia properly exercised personal jurisdiction over the 

Defendant, Adam Bailey, when (i) the Plaintiffs, Larry 

Klayman and Vincent Forras, are not District of Columbia 

residents; (ii) Defendant Bailey never set foot in the District 

in the two decades prior to the lawsuit; (iii) the lawsuit arises 

from allegedly defamatory statements Bailey made in a New 

York state court filing that (iv) were later published by a New 

York reporter (v) in a New York paper, and (vi) the 

statements concern Klayman’s and Forras’s roles in New 

York litigation concerning (vii) a controversial construction 

project in New York City. 

The answer to that question is a straightforward “no.” 

There is no personal jurisdiction in this case over Bailey in 

the District of Columbia. 

I

This case has its genesis in a controversy surrounding the 

so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” In mid-2010, Imam Feisal 

Abdul Rauf and others in New York City sought to build an 

Islamic community center and mosque in lower Manhattan, a 

few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks of 

September 11, 2001. See Michael Barbaro, Debate Heating 

Up on Plans for Mosque Near Ground Zero, N.Y. TIMES, at 

A1 (July 31, 2010). 

On September 9, 2010, Vincent Forras, a former 

firefighter from South Salem, New York, filed suit in New 

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York Supreme Court against Imam Rauf. The lawsuit alleged 

that the plan to build a mosque and community center near the 

World Trade Center site constituted a nuisance, intentional 

and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and assault. 

Larry Klayman represented Forras in that lawsuit. Rauf, 

through his attorney Adam Bailey, filed a motion to dismiss 

the Forras complaint. His memorandum in support of that 

motion asserted, among other things, that (i) Forras was “a 

nationally recognized bigot,” (ii) Forras believes “Islam 

equates with terrorism,” and (iii) Forras has become 

“America’s Spokesman of Bigotry.” In addition, Bailey 

submitted an “Affirmation in Support of Motion to Dismiss” 

which said in relevant part:

10. As a lawyer I cannot tolerate the destruction of 

the American Constitution at the hands of those who 

had been pledged to defend it. I will not let the right 

to prayer in the manner one chooses be silenced by 

shouts of rage; I will not let the right to the free 

exercise of religion be confined by narrowness of 

vision; and I will not let the right to erect a house of 

prayer be torn down by blind bigotry.

11. Ground Zero is a scar upon the landscape of New 

York City not only because of the loss of 3,000 

innocent lives, sacrificed at the altar of international 

fanaticism, but because it allows bigotry like that of 

Plaintiff in this suit to flourish in the rich mud of 

ignorance and religious intolerance. The diversity of 

America is not its weakness, but its strength. When 

in the days following an analogous atrocity in 1941

our people marshaled their will and marched off, 

nobody was an American of this type or that. We 

were all united under a single banner pledged to 

eradicate the very kind of religious intolerance we 

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see in Plaintiff, represented in those years by the 

Third Reich and those aligned with it.

On October 11, 2010, the New York Post—a New Yorkbased daily newspaper with nationwide circulation—

published an article quoting one of those statements. J.A. 136

(“The developers behind the proposed mosque and cultural 

center near Ground Zero are blasting a $350 million lawsuit 

filed by a 9/11 first responder as ‘blind bigotry.’”).

The New York Supreme Court subsequently granted 

Rauf’s motion to dismiss on the ground that the complaint 

failed to state any legally cognizable claim for relief. See

Forras v. Rauf, 975 N.Y.S. 2d 366, 2012 WL 7986872 (N.Y. 

Sup. Ct. 2012). 

Shortly thereafter, both Forras and Klayman filed suit 

against Bailey in the District of Columbia Superior Court 

alleging defamation, false light, assault, and intentional 

infliction of emotional distress caused by the statements 

Bailey made in dismissal papers filed in New York Supreme 

Court and the reporting of one of those statements in the New 

York Post. Four months later, Klayman and Forras 

voluntarily dismissed that lawsuit and filed the present action

against Bailey in the United States District Court for the 

District of Columbia.

1

Bailey filed a motion to dismiss on multiple grounds, 

asserting: (i) lack of subject-matter jurisdiction; (ii) lack of

personal jurisdiction; (iii) statute of limitations; (iv) the 

judicial-proceedings privilege; (v) First Amendment

protection; and (vi) collateral estoppel and res judicata. In 

 1 Although the Plaintiffs sued Rauf in federal court, Rauf did 

not appear in the district court and does not appear here.

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addition, Bailey asked the court to dismiss the case under the 

District of Columbia’s Anti-Strategic Lawsuits Against Public 

Participation Act of 2010 (the Anti-SLAPP Act), D.C. Code 

§ 16-5501–5505. That law imposes a heightened pleading 

standard for claims related to “act[s] in furtherance of the 

right of advocacy on issues of public interest” by requiring 

plaintiffs to show that their claims are “likely to succeed on 

the merits.” Id. § 16-5502(b).

The district court granted the motion to dismiss. The 

court first held that the District’s Anti-SLAPP Act, rather than 

ordinary federal rules of pleading, should be applied in federal 

diversity cases. The court then held that the complaint failed 

under the Anti-SLAPP Act because Forras and Klayman had 

not shown that they were likely to succeed on the merits of

any of their claims.2

 In addition, the court ruled that the 

statute of limitations barred all of the claims in the complaint. 

The district court did not address either subject-matter or 

personal jurisdiction.

3

 

II

Bailey’s motion to dismiss raised both jurisdictional and 

merits objections to the complaint. Ordinarily, determining 

jurisdiction is a federal court’s first order of business. 

 2 This court subsequently ruled in Abbas v. Foreign Policy 

Group, LLC, 783 F.3d 1328 (D.C. Cir. 2015), that a federal court 

exercising diversity jurisdiction cannot apply the Anti-SLAPP 

Act’s heightened pleading provision.

3

 Bailey also filed a motion for attorneys’ fees, and the district 

court’s order invited Bailey to document his request. The district 

court, however, subsequently stayed the attorneys’ fee motion 

pending disposition of this appeal.

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“Without jurisdiction the court cannot proceed at all in any 

cause.” Ex parte McCardle, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 506, 514 

(1868). Indeed, for a district court “to pronounce upon the 

meaning or the constitutionality of a state or federal law when 

it has no jurisdiction to do so is, by very definition, for a court 

to act ultra vires.” Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better 

Environment, 523 U.S. 83, 101–102 (1998); see also, e.g.,

Broudy v. Mather, 460 F.3d 106, 111 (D.C. Cir. 2006) (“We 

begin, as we must, with the question whether the District 

Court had jurisdiction to consider the plaintiffs’ claims.”); 

Tuck v. Pan American Health Org., 668 F.2d 547, 549 (D.C. 

Cir. 1981) (“Jurisdiction is, of necessity, the first issue for an 

Article III court.”).

Without even acknowledging this background rule, the 

district court leapfrogged over the serious jurisdictional issues 

that Bailey raised and decided the Anti-SLAPP Act and 

statute-of-limitations questions. But assessing jurisdiction is 

not a “legal nicet[y]”; it is an “essential ingredient” of our 

ability to hear a case. Steel Co., 523 U.S. at 101. The district 

court plainly should have satisfied any jurisdictional concerns 

before turning to a merits question like the Anti-SLAPP Act. 

And the court should have at least paused to address whether 

deciding an issue like the statute of limitations before 

confirming its jurisdiction accords with Steel Co. and its 

progeny. Cf. Sinochem International Co. Ltd. v. Malaysia 

International Shipping Corp., 549 U.S. 422, 432 (2007) 

(recognizing that a court may dismiss a case on forum non 

conveniens grounds before addressing jurisdiction).

What is clear is that we can “turn[] directly to personal

jurisdiction” to resolve this case because, unlike the 

complicated subject-matter jurisdiction and fact-intensive 

statute-of-limitations issues in this case, the absence of 

personal jurisdiction over Defendant Bailey is 

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“straightforward” and “present[s] no complex question of 

state law,” Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil Co., 526 U.S. 574, 

588 (1999).4

The complaint fails to allege any plausible basis for 

exercising personal jurisdiction over the only defendant in this 

case, Adam Bailey. To establish personal jurisdiction over a 

non-resident like Bailey, we must first decide whether 

statutory jurisdiction exists under the District’s long-arm 

statute and, if it does, then we must determine whether an 

exercise of jurisdiction would comport with constitutional 

limitations. See GTE New Media Services Inc. v. BellSouth 

Corp., 199 F.3d 1343, 1347 (D.C. Cir. 2000).5

The District of Columbia’s long-arm statute provides, as 

relevant here:

 4 With respect to subject-matter jurisdiction, the Plaintiffs 

failed specifically to allege the parties’ diverse citizenship in their 

complaint, even though they bore the burden of establishing 

jurisdiction by “pleading the citizenship of each and every party to 

the action.” Naartex Consulting Corp. v. Watt, 722 F.2d 779, 792 

(D.C. Cir. 1983). The Plaintiffs did, however, include addresses 

from diverse States below each party’s name in the case caption. It 

is far from clear that merely listing addresses in a caption

discharges a plaintiff’s duty to plead facts showing diverse 

citizenship. Nevertheless, given the clear absence of personal 

jurisdiction, we need not address that question, and we deny as 

moot the Plaintiffs’ motion to amend the record on appeal to allege 

facts bearing on the parties’ citizenship.

5 The Plaintiffs have never alleged that Bailey had such 

“continuous and systematic” contacts within the District of 

Columbia to warrant the assertion of general personal jurisdiction, 

nor could they on this record. See International Shoe Co. v. 

Washington, 326 U.S. 310, 317 (1945).

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(a) A District of Columbia court may exercise 

personal jurisdiction over a person, who acts directly 

or by an agent, as to a claim for relief arising from 

the person’s —

(1) transacting any business in the District of 

Columbia;

* * * * *

(3) causing tortious injury in the District of 

Columbia by an act or omission in the District of 

Columbia; [or]

(4) causing tortious injury in the District of 

Columbia by an act or omission outside the District 

of Columbia if he regularly does or solicits business, 

engages in any other persistent course of conduct, or 

derives substantial revenue from goods used or 

consumed, or services rendered, in the District of 

Columbia; * * *

D.C. Code § 13-423(a). 

The complaint’s allegations fall short of what the longarm statute requires. 

First, with respect to subsection (a)(1), the Plaintiffs did 

not allege “a claim for relief arising from [Bailey’s] * * * 

transacting any business in the District of Columbia,” or even 

suggest that he conducts or ever conducted any business 

within the District. D.C. Code § 13-423(a)(1). To be sure, 

that provision has been held “to be coextensive (for cases that 

fit within its description) with the Constitution’s due process 

limit.” Crane v. Carr, 814 F.2d 758, 762 (D.C. Cir. 1987) 

(Ruth Bader Ginsburg, J.) (citing Mouzavires v. Baxter, 434 

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A.2d 988, 990–992 (D.C. 1981)). But subsection (a)(1) still 

“contemplates a connection that [is] []related to the claim in 

suit.” Id. at 763. Bailey “d[id] not, nor ha[d] [he] ever 

practiced law or conducted any * * * business in the District 

of Columbia,” and he had not even “visited the District of 

Columbia for any purpose since 1990.” J.A. 49. After the 

complaint was filed, he made a single, three-day trip to the 

District of Columbia in September 2012 for a conference that 

was entirely unrelated to this lawsuit. “Otherwise, [he had] 

no personal or professional contacts with the District of 

Columbia.” Id. 

The Plaintiffs have neither disputed those facts nor made 

any plausible allegation linking their defamation and other 

related claims to business Bailey conducted within the 

District. All the Plaintiffs have argued under this prong of the 

long-arm statute is that Bailey’s “activity was directed at a 

D.C. resident and, in fact, reached and affected said resident.” 

ECF No. 9 at 13. The plain text of subsection (a)(1), 

however, focuses on where the defendant undertook the 

challenged (business) actions, not where the plaintiff felt the 

injury, and the Plaintiffs’ argument does nothing to suggest 

that Bailey himself transacted his challenged legal (or any 

other) business in the District. 

Second and similarly, with respect to subsection (a)(3), 

the complaint makes no plausible allegation that Bailey’s 

tortious “act or omission” was undertaken in the District. 

D.C. Code § 13-423(a)(3). To the contrary, the complaint is 

clear that the challenged statements were made in New York. 

The Plaintiffs argued below that the court could assert 

personal jurisdiction under subsection (a)(3) because the 

alleged injury was felt within the District. Controlling circuit 

precedent forecloses that argument. Subsection (a)(3) “is a 

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precise and intentionally restricted tort section, * * * which 

stops short of the outer limits of due process, * * * and which 

confers jurisdiction only over a defendant who commits an act 

in the District which causes an injury in the District, without 

regard to any other contacts.” Moncrief v. Lexington HeraldLeader Co., 807 F.2d 217, 221 (D.C. Cir. 1986) (emphasis 

added; citations and quotation marks omitted). And this court 

has twice held that publishing defamatory or otherwise 

tortious statements within the District that were made outside 

the District falls short of what subsection (a)(3) requires. 

In McFarlane v. Esquire Magazine, 74 F.3d 1296 (D.C. 

Cir. 1996), this court ruled that subsection (a)(3) did not 

permit the exercise of personal jurisdiction over the author of 

an allegedly defamatory article that was published in Esquire 

Magazine in New York because the author’s “acts were not in 

the District; it [was] undisputed that he wrote the article in 

New York and delivered it to Esquire in New York.” Id. at 

1300. In so holding, we explicitly rejected the argument—

pressed again by the Plaintiffs here—that their “injury is part 

of the tort.” Id. That is because such a theory “would 

obliterate subsection (3)’s careful distinction between ‘injury’ 

and ‘act.’” Id. 

Likewise, in Moncrief, we held that subsection (a)(3) had 

no application to a claim that a nonresident newspaper 

publisher had “sen[t] an allegedly libelous article into the 

District of Columbia.” 807 F.2d at 218. The relevant “act,” 

we explained, was the “uttering [of] defamatory statements,” 

and the “printing and mailing of the newspaper,” all of which 

happened outside of the District. Id. at 220 (internal quotation 

marks and citation omitted). In direct answer to the Plaintiffs’ 

argument here, Moncrief ruled that subsection (a)(3) draws a 

sharp line between “the act of the defendant and the injury it 

causes,” id. at 221, so that alleging that “[t]he brunt of the 

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injury, in particular the damage to appellants’ professional 

reputation, occurred in Washington, D.C.” falls far short of 

triggering subsection (a)(3) of the long-arm statute, id. at 220 

n.7 (quoting Brief of Appellant at 7–8, Moncrief, 807 F.2d 

217 (No. 85-6153)); see also Margoles v. Johns, 483 F.2d 

1212, 1213 (D.C. Cir. 1973) (subsection (a)(3) does not 

support personal jurisdiction over an out-of-District

newspaper reporter who called a congressional office and 

“maliciously spoke” of the plaintiff).

Given that extensive, directly on-point, and controlling 

precedent, for which the Plaintiffs offered no colorable 

distinction, the assertion of personal jurisdiction under 

subsection (a)(3) is meritless. 

Third and finally, subsection (a)(4) provides the Plaintiffs 

no jurisdictional refuge. That provision permits an exercise of 

jurisdiction over a tortious act or omission committed outside 

the District that causes injury within the District if, and only 

if, the defendant “regularly does or solicits business, engages 

in any other persistent course of conduct, or derives 

substantial revenue from * * * services rendered” in the 

District. D.C. Code § 13-423(a)(4). “The drafters of [D.C.’s 

long-arm statute] apparently intended that the (a)(4) 

subsection would not occupy all of the constitutionally 

available space.” Crane, 814 F.2d at 762. The statute 

requires both an injury inside the District, and that “the 

defendant engages in some persistent course of conduct or 

derives substantial revenue from the District.” Moncrief, 807 

F.2d at 221. Nothing in the complaint or the Plaintiffs’ 

argument even hints at such persisting conduct or benefit tied 

to the District. 

The Plaintiffs argued that the “continuing and ongoing” 

publication of Bailey’s allegedly defamatory comments

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triggered subsection (a)(4). ECF No. 9 at 15. Not so. Bailey 

has not published anything within the District; he just filed his 

dismissal papers in New York state court. Indeed, just as in 

McFarlane, not a word of the complaint alleges that Bailey 

made a penny from the newspaper’s publication within the 

District of a single quote from his dismissal papers. See 

McFarlane, 74 F.3d at 1300. Moreover, McFarlane 

specifically held that “writing an article for a publication that 

is circulated throughout the nation, including the District, 

hardly constitutes doing or soliciting business, or engaging in 

a persistent course of conduct, within the District.” Id. Even 

less so, then, could Bailey’s remarks in papers filed in a New 

York court that someone else chose to quote in a newspaper 

article suffice.6

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Calder v. Jones, 465 

U.S. 783 (1984)—which was issued well before our decision 

in McFarlane—does nothing to help the Plaintiffs. That 

decision analyzed personal jurisdiction under the federal 

Constitution’s Due Process Clause alone, because California’s 

long-arm statute allowed jurisdiction “whenever permitted by 

the state and federal Constitutions.” Id. at 789 n.5. 

Subsection (a)(4)’s reach is far more cabined. See

McFarlane, 74 F.3d at 1300; Crane, 814 F.2d at 762; 

Moncrief, 807 F.2d at 221. 

 6 The Plaintiffs also make the argument that “[d]efendants 

intended to reach the public in D.C., particularly the many Muslims 

residing in D.C.” so that the Plaintiffs “would be subject to attacks 

incited by the defamatory statements.” ECF No. 9 at 14. That bald 

assertion is unsupported by any assertion of fact within the 

complaint. Anyhow, the intent to reach readers in the District did 

not work in McFarlane, and fares no better here.

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In any event, the Calder Court allowed personal 

jurisdiction over the reporter and publisher of an allegedly 

defamatory article because the article concerned the 

“California activities of a California resident,” and “[t]he 

article was drawn from California sources.” 465 U.S. at 788 

(emphases added). As a result, “California [was] the focal 

point both of the story and of the harm suffered.” Id. at 789. 

This case, by contrast, involves the alleged defamation in 

New York of a non-District resident by a New York resident 

arising out of New York litigation over a New York landdevelopment dispute. Neither the District of Columbia nor 

any conduct by any party within the District is even 

mentioned in the pleadings or the article at issue. 

On top of that, the Plaintiffs here seek to assert personal 

jurisdiction over the author of an affidavit and legal brief that 

provided the source of a quoted statement in an article; they 

have not sued the author or publisher of an article, as occurred 

in Calder. See Clemens v. McNamee, 615 F.3d 374, 380 (5th 

Cir. 2010) (Due Process Clause did not permit Texas courts to 

assert personal jurisdiction over a non-Texas resident for 

allegedly defamatory statements made in New York about a 

Texas plaintiff and published by Sports Illustrated in a widely

publicized report and on its website, since “the statements did 

not concern activity in Texas; nor were they made in Texas or 

directed to Texas residents any more than residents of any 

state.”).

* * *

Under controlling circuit precedent, the complaint makes 

no plausible allegation of personal jurisdiction over Bailey, 

and the district court should have promptly dismissed the case

on that basis. However, because the district court dismissed 

the case, we can affirm the district court’s judgment on the 

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alternative ground that it lacked jurisdiction, see FED. R. CIV.

P. 12(b)(2).

So ordered.

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