The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on Tuesday against Aneesa Johnson, whom Georgetown University hired in August 2023 as assistant director of academic and faculty affairs at its Walsh School of Foreign Service. Johnson sued for $10 million in damages after the university fired her for a series of antisemitic posts on social media.
Rachel Wolff, a Jewish dual-degree student at the Georgetown foreign service and law schools, researched Johnson after the latter was hired and found, via a profile from the watchdog Canary Mission, that Johnson had posted things like “You know why I call them Zio bitches, because they’re dogs,” using a derogatory term for “Zionist.”
Another post, which included an image of an Orthodox Jewish boy, stated that “when the world hates you because you are a thief and grew up looking like a shaytan,” an Islamic reference to the devil. “Growing up Israeli.”
Wolff posted what she found, and Johnson was suspended and then fired. Johnson then sued Georgetown for wrongful termination and added Wolff, Canary Mission and several of the watchdog’s funders, and others who posted critically about her anti-Jewish statements, to the lawsuit.
Johnson alleged in her lawsuit that her posts were the result of “lived experience” and that her story reflects “the systematic dispossession and institutionalized discrimination that Palestinians have endured under Europe’s Zionist apartheid regime in occupied Palestine.” She also referred to the “genocide” she has suffered “secondarily as a displaced refugee living in exile.”
The court called the case “a proxy war of sorts for the conflict that continues to play out on college campuses over events in Israel and Gaza.”
Free speech is not free of consequences, the court said. “If our words are caustic and hurtful, they may not only injure others but also sully our own reputations and cost us valuable opportunities and benefits, including in employment.”
The ruling said that such consequences are particularly true for “those entrusted with the education of our students and future leaders.”
“Members of the academy—and, yes, judges and other public figures whose words reach impressionable ears—should model respectful discourse for those next up the rungs,” it said.
Johnson’s role at Georgetown was to be the “primary point of contact” for master’s students on “everything academic,” according to the school.
Paul Eckles, senior litigation counsel at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which partnered with Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher to represent Wolff, told JNS that “our client never should have been sued.”
“As the court found, nothing that my client posted was false,” Eckles said. “Nothing that my client posted was wrongful.”
“The decision is great vindication for our client. It’s a great victory for the First Amendment right to free speech, including the right to draw attention to bigotry and hateful speech,” he said. “We commend our client for having the courage to speak out.”
Eckles told JNS that there is a growing number of “frivolous” cases, in which those who call attention to Jew-hatred are being sued.
“People are asserting these claims to try and silence people,” he said.
The ruling “establishes a clear precedent that people have the right to free speech, to draw attention to antisemitism that they witnessed and that the court process cannot be used to silence them and squelch that right,” he told JNS.
The court dismissed all of Johnson’s claims, except those against Canary Mission. It admonished Johnson’s legal for specious reasoning in trying to tie donors to Canary Mission’s profile of Johnson and Georgetown’s decision to fire her, especially as it verified that the antisemitic posts were not misrepresented.
The judge disciplined Johnson’s lawyer for going after two of Canary Mission’s donors, the Jewish Federation Bay Area and the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation.
Per the final order, Johnson may file a motion for default judgment against Canary Mission, since it was named and served as a defendant but chose not to participate in the trial.
