Opinion ID: 4512152
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Nature and Degree of Injury to Hack

Text: We further conclude that the District Court failed to give adequate weight to Hack’s privacy interests. At the threshold, the court set the bar for what “amounts to the sort of ‘extraordinary circumstance’ that would justify keeping it from the public” decidedly too high in the context presented. Hack App’x 143. In the District Court’s view, the subject of the deposition video—although it concerned in substantial part Hack’s experience, as a minor, of sexual abuse by a respected religious figure and elder—simply did not amount to “[t]he archetypical extraordinary case,” which was “far more gruesome.” Id. The court provided as a contrasting example “videos made by [a] kidnapper of [a] blindfolded and bound rape victim,” such as a district court denied media access to in a 1980 case in another jurisdiction. Id. (citing In re KSTP Television, 504 F. Supp. 360 (D. Minn. 1980)). KSTP, the decision that the District Court pointed to, involved a request by a commercial television station “to view and copy some three hours of tapes received in evidence in a criminal case.” 504 F. Supp. at 361. The videos that the network sought depicted the criminal defendant, who by then had been convicted of kidnapping, interacting with one of his victims. Id. Of the nine hours of footage at issue, the court had received into evidence three hours. Id. Those hours contained images of “conversations and conduct preliminary to, and anticipatory of, the actual sexual acts” the defendant committed on his victim. Id. The KSTP court denied the network’s request, resting its decision on the nature of the conduct, its observation that “[a]ll of the information in the tapes has already been made available to the public,” and the high value it assigned the innocence and privacy of the victim. Id. at 362‐64 (concluding that there was “no public interest to be served by release of the tapes” here). 20 Some years later, in 1987, we decided CBS. There, we reversed a district court’s denial of the television network’s application to copy for possible broadcast a witness’s video deposition that had been shown in full in open court during a criminal trial. The deponent in CBS was an imprisoned former union leader who “appeared ill in the videotape and was compelled to testify concerning his involvement in illegal activities.” CBS, 828 F.2d at 961. In ordering the public release of the video deposition, we distinguished the case from KSTP, citing the videos that were at issue in KSTP as an example of judicial documents to which public access could lawfully be precluded. See id. But our citation there of KSTP should by no means be read to establish a hurdle of “gruesomeness” that other cases must clear to overcome the common law presumption of access, powerful as it is; indeed, the reasoning of the KSTP court more resonates with ours here. Nor is CBS determinative of the outcome here, as our primary focus in CBS was whether the presumption of public access applied at all to video recordings of depositions. We devoted very little discussion to the opposing party’s countervailing privacy interests, of which there were but few: In granting access in CBS, we observed only that “[o]ld age and ill health are neither uncommon nor generally a cause of severe embarrassment,” and concluded that the situation of the elderly and ill deponent, who was confessing to his own criminal conduct, “is simply not analogous to, say, that of a victim of a slasher.” Id. Other circumstances present in CBS also make that decision less apposite here: While the CBS deponent had been convicted of crimes relevant to his testimony, Hack has not been convicted of, or even charged with, any crime. While the CBS deponent described his own criminal activity, Hack described being a victim of a crime when he was a minor. And while the CBS deponent’s advanced age and illness were neither 21 uncommon nor particularly embarrassing, Hack’s description—of a sexual relationship that a trusted religious leader over 30 years his senior perpetrated in Hack’s youth and into his young adulthood—is likely both. Finally, that the video at issue here also contains Hack’s admission to his own wrongful behavior—namely, his failure to report Greer’s abuse of Mirlis—seems of relatively little import in the context of Mirlis’s suit against Greer. In sum, Hack is more akin to the “innocent third part[y]” whose privacy interests “weigh heavily in a court’s balancing equation,” Amodeo II, 71 F.3d at 1050, than he is to the CBS deponent whose circumstances were “solely the result of his criminal acts,” CBS, 828 F.2d at 961. In addition, although the District Court acknowledged that courts are generally protective of the privacy interest of non‐parties like Hack, it discounted the weight due that interest in Hack’s case. It gave three reasons: (1) Hack’s testimony had already been made publicly available in transcript form; (2) Hack effectively consented to the publication of his deposition testimony when he agreed to sit for a deposition without requesting authority to use a pseudonym or that the deposition be sealed; and (3) Hack evaded process and refused to appear and give live testimony at trial, a decision that created the need to present his video testimony to the jury in the first place. Each one of these rationales for discounting Hack’s privacy interests is flawed. With respect to the first rationale, the availability of a transcript of the deposition does not in our view necessarily eliminate or even diminish a party’s privacy interest in the publication or copying of a video of those proceedings. To the contrary: That the substance of the desired content is publicly available in some format (i.e., a transcript) tends in the circumstances presented here to cut against the public interest in the release 22 of the content in a different form (i.e., video), since the primary public interest—general availability of the relevant information—has already been served.12 We break no new ground by articulating this principle. The Supreme Court in Nixon explained, in declining to compel the release of audio tapes, that the public interest in accessing audio recordings is weaker where “[r]eporters also were furnished transcripts of . . . tapes,” reasoning that the fact that “[t]he contents of th[ose] tapes were given wide publicity” negated any “question of a truncated flow of information to the public.” 435 U.S. at 609. Here, as in Nixon, the substantive information conveyed to the jury in the video of Hack’s deposition has been made public and has been written about in the local press, to all appearances largely satisfying the legitimate public interest in the trial. What remains private is solely the video recorded images of Hack actually saying these words—the publication of which, especially on the Internet, would impose a significant burden on Hack by immediately and forever connecting the extremely personal content of his testimony with his likeness, exposing his emotions as a victim. We have not set an absolute rule that the public availability of a deposition transcript guarantees the court’s protection of a deposition video, nor do we do so now. As we observed in CBS, “[v]ideotaped depositions . . . convey the meaning of testimony more accurately and preserve demeanor evidence as well.” 828 F.2d at 960. These 12The availability of the transcript also tends to raise doubt about the legitimacy of Dressler’s motives in requesting physical access to the video. Indeed, as the District Court noted, mainstream media gave significant coverage to Hack’s testimony when it was presented in court. Yet none of these media entities intervened in the proceedings at bar to request access to the video; for purposes of their reporting, they were all apparently satisfied with either having heard the testimony firsthand or having access to the transcript. The record reflects that only Dressler, who has published personal details of Hack’s life unrelated to the subject matter of the trial, has sought access to the video. 23 undoubtedly are valuable components of the truth‐finding process. The general rule of production that we applied in 1987 in CBS thus remains vital today. But we must also acknowledge what has changed since we decided CBS in 1987: The astonishing and pervasive rise of the Internet; the attendant ease with which videos may be shared worldwide by individuals; and the eternal digital life with which those videos are likely endowed by even a single display online. These are all factors that multiply and intensify the privacy costs to the individual of releasing sensitive videos; those costs are undeniably greater than what they might have been 30 years ago. Whereas the subject of a video deposition made public in 1987 may have suffered brief notoriety and embarrassment as the subject of an evening’s newscast, today, Hack could reasonably fear that, for the rest of his life, this video would be the first result of an internet search for his name. Given the proliferation of smartphones and improved digital streaming capabilities, he could also reasonably expect, as a schoolteacher and father, that his students and his children would view the video not only at home, on family computers, but possibly also during (his) class, on their cell phones. Common sense and over two decades of widespread and constant use of the Internet are sufficient to tell us that a video of a person describing details of his abuse is likely to garner more attention, be distributed more widely, and last longer in the public’s attention than are copies of a transcript or even local news articles. With respect to the second rationale, Dressler argues that we should construe Hack’s failure to request a pseudonym for use during the deposition, to seek restrictions on the video’s airing to the jury, or to move to seal the transcript, as amounting to his consent to general publication of the entire video deposition. But this can hardly be a fair conclusion. As explained above, the dissemination of the deposition video and the publication of the transcript impose very different privacy burdens, regardless of the 24 fact that the transcript uses Hack’s name. Hack’s failure to request a pseudonym or the sealing of the transcript thus has little bearing on his privacy interest in the video, nor would it have had the effect of disguising his identity, given his unique position at the Yeshiva during the years in question. For the same reason, Hack’s failure to seek to prevent the video deposition from being played at trial—where it would be shown likely just once, to a limited audience, and in a venue where electronic recording is generally prohibited—cannot reasonably be treated as implicit consent to the video’s wider publication across the Internet. In certain instances, a person who declines to take reasonable steps to protect his or her private information may reasonably be understood to stake a lesser privacy claim in that information. Here, however, Hack diligently and timely objected to Dressler’s application. Only rarely will voluntary provision of sensitive evidence reasonably be understood to constitute consent to the widespread and likely permanent dissemination of a visual digital record of the formal encounter through which that evidence was given, when the encounter itself is not the allegedly critical act. With respect to the third rationale, Hack’s evasion of service, while certainly wrongful, was an attempt to protect his privacy by avoiding testifying in open court about sensitive and embarrassing subjects. Whatever sanction a non‐party witness might merit for such actions, publicly releasing the very sensitive images that the witness so fiercely struggled to keep private, where such release may not otherwise be warranted, is not among them, contrary to Dressler’s argument. A holding otherwise could be expected to disincentivize naturally reluctant victim‐witnesses from facilitating their depositions in the first place; it would hardly encourage them to give live testimony at trial.