Miltenberg: “Suing Under Pseudonyms Faces School’s ‘Chilling’ Challenge,” Law360

6.10.19

Michael Dolce knows all too well the stigma that often muzzles victims of sexual assault, having been abused as a young boy. The Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC attorney told Law360 he stayed silent for nearly 30 years before publicly disclosing what he’d suffered in a 2007 testimony to a Florida Senate committee. “It’s frightening,” he told Law360. “The world changes when you make a disclosure like this.” But while Dolce voluntarily made that decision as part of a successful campaign to erase the state’s statutes of limitations for prosecuting child sex abuse, one of his clients faces exposure of a more threatening nature — the prospect of being forced to reveal her identity in ongoing Title IX litigation against her former school, Florida A&M University … Andrew Miltenberg of Nesenoff & Miltenberg LLP, a defender well-known for his representation of men accused of sexual assault, told Law360 that FAMU’s appeal is “really heavy-handed.” “There is nothing about defending one of these cases that requires the name to be public,” he pointed out. Miltenberg is currently representing Stephen Elliott, a writer and filmmaker who sued fellow writer Moira Donegan for defamation after she created and distributed a crowd-sourced “S***** Media Men List” spreadsheet that identified him as someone with “rape accusations.” Miltenberg has sought to force Google to identify an estimated 30 Jane Does who may have anonymously inserted the rape accusations against his client as part of the list, which surfaced in October 2017 during the beginning stages of the #MeToo era. But as opposed to FAMU, Miltenberg said, he’s not aiming to expose their identities in the public record. “The reason we want the names is not to make them public, but for evidentiary and damages purposes,” he told Law360.

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