A Jacksonville anti-abortion activist is suing Google, arguing the internet giant violated Florida state law by shutting down her account without warning or a chance to recover photos and information there.
Losing the longtime account felt “like coming home to a house, which took me twelve years to furnish with family mementos and treasures, and find[ing] it completely empty without even a note explaining why,” 76-year-old Trudy Perez-Poveda said in a statement that was part of a release about the lawsuit.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in Duval County Circuit Court may be the state’s first since a U.S. Supreme Court decision this month dismantled an injunction blocking that law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis had championed as “protection against the Silicon Valley elites.”
The suit said the plaintiff, referred to as “Mrs. Perez,” had kept a Google account since 2012 and used it for things including her volunteer work with a group called Family For Life, which it described as “persons who pray, counsel and sometimes hold Catholic Mass and Eucharistic processions near abortion clinics.”
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Why was the account shut down?
Last September, the lawsuit said, Perez emailed group members about a Mass being planned across an access road from A Woman’s Choice of Jacksonville, a clinic at 4131 University Blvd. S.
About an hour later, the suit said, Google sent a notice that her account had been suspended but didn’t say why.
She communicated for about 10 days with a Google employee who first talked about restoring her service and then said the account was permanently disabled for violating the company’s acceptable use policy.
Perez asked what she had done wrong and was told that “due to security reasons we are unable to share the exact policy which was violated,” the lawsuit said.
Although the reason her account was shut down still hasn’t been disclosed, Perez is being counseled by lawyers from the Thomas More Society, a law firm involved in issues including abortion, which cast the case as being about censoring Perez’s message.
‘Ominous growth of censorship’
“There is an ominous growth of censorship in this country,” Matt Heffron, senior counsel at Thomas More, said in written remarks.
“Large social-media companies act as a ‘digital public square,’ and play a central role in the debate of ideas. Our case … is part of the urgent and overdue pushback against this rising tide of censorship,” Heffron said. “Nobody should be treated the way Google treated Trudy Perez.”
He said Friday the group can’t be positive Google’s actions were tied to either abortion or religious issues generally but said it was a reasonable assumption until more information was available.
Heffron said the law against deplatforming that DeSantis signed in 2021 was violated regardless of why Google took down Perez’s account because the company was required to give an explanation and never did.
Google didn’t respond to a message Thursday seeking comment on the lawsuit.
Perez has been involved in controversy over her views on abortion in the past.
In 2021, she was shoved to the ground by a 19-year-old patient of A Woman’s Choice after Perez photographed her, according to coverage by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s program Reveal previously published in the Times-Union. The teen was charged with battery on a person over 65, a felony, after Perez dialed 911, according to coverage of that case.