Two bloggers from the nonprofit group Friends for Fullerton’s Future will each be paid $60,000 by the city of Fullerton and the city will retract allegations of criminal hacking against them, the Orange County Register reported.
The city sued the two bloggers, Joshua Ferguson and David Curlee in 2019, claiming they stole personnel files from a Dropbox account and later published some of them online, the story said. The city mistakenly gave the two men access to the Dropbox account, according to the Register.
Fullerton City Council approved a settlement of the lawsuit May 12, with the city agreeing to pay $120,000 to the bloggers and an additional $230,000 to their attorney, Kelly Aviles, the Register reported.
Some of the published files involved a “rogue” police official, the story said.
“From the jump, the city threatened us with a misdemeanor and demanded we unpublish documents, which is an illegal prior restraint against the 1st Amendment,” Ferguson told the Southern California Record.
“This was always about blame-shifting to cover up the negligence and criminal behavior of the City Attorney’s office.”
The settlement was not a win for the city, Ferguson said.
“The city of Fullerton in general hardly 'won' in any sense of the word when they have to pay $350,000 after suing us for their own attorney’s gross negligence,” he said.
On its website, Friends for Fullerton’s Future called the lawsuit against the bloggers “retaliatory.”
The bloggers were simply trying to get information from their government, the group said.
"The winners here are justice (deliberately stalled, to be sure) and journalistic freedom against prior restraint; and, of course, any people who want to be able to get information that their own government is legally obligated to provide," said Friends for Fullerton's Future.
“The losers, once again, are the taxpayers of Fullerton, who are on the hook for $350,000.”