Eckhart v. Fox News Network, LLC

Background

Defendant Ed Henry filed a motion to dismiss the action and submitted 21 exhibits. Fifteen exhibits contained nude or partially nude photographs of Plaintiff Jennifer Eckhart. Eckhart asked the court to seal docket entries 85-7 through 85-21.

Legal standard

The court applied the Second Circuit’s test for sealing court records. First, it considered whether the materials were “judicial documents”—documents relevant to the court’s work and useful in the judicial process. Judicial documents generally carry a common-law presumption that the public may access them. The court then weighs that presumption against competing considerations, including privacy interests.

Because the photographs were submitted with a motion to dismiss, they would generally be treated as judicial documents subject to a presumption of public access. But the court concluded that the photographs were highly sensitive and that Eckhart had an understandable privacy interest in keeping them private. The court also determined that the photographs were evidence outside the pleadings that it was not permitted to consider on the motion to dismiss and therefore should not have been filed with that motion. For those reasons, the photographs were not, at that stage, relevant to the court’s work or useful in the judicial process.

Ruling

The court found that the privacy interests and the photographs’ improper status as outside evidence outweighed the presumption of public access. It ordered that Eckhart’s motion to seal Exhibits 7 through 21 was granted, without prejudice to an application to unseal the exhibits at an appropriate time. The exhibits were to be visible only to Jennifer Eckhart, Fox News Network, LLC, Ed Henry, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz, counsel for the parties, and court staff. The clerk was directed to terminate the motion pending at docket entry 91.