Briefing Ordered Unsealed in N.J. Case Involving Gag Order on Jewish Woman Who Claimed Her Husband Denied Her Jewish Divorce
Back in 2023, I blogged about S.B.B. v. L.B.B., a New Jersey intermediate appellate court case:
[T]he plaintiff husband and defendant wife were getting divorced, and the wife claimed that the husband wasn’t giving her a Jewish religious divorce. (The husband “denied withholding the get, claimed he had given the get to the Chief Rabbi of Elizabeth in June 2020.”) To quote the court,
In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, a married woman cannot obtain a religious divorce until her husband provides her with a contract called a “get” (pluralized as “gittin“), which must, in turn, be signed by an “eid,” or witness. A woman who attempts to leave her husband without obtaining a get becomes an “agunah” (pluralized as “agunot“), which subjects her to severe social ostracism within the Orthodox Jewish community. Agunot may seek relief in a “beth din,” a rabbinical court presided over by a panel of three rabbis. The beth din may then issue “psak kefiah,” or contempt orders authorizing sanctions, which include, but are not limited to, the use of force against a husband to secure a get.
The wife made a video, which ended up getting broadly distributed online, and in which she apparently said:
Hi. My name is [L.B.B.]. I’m a mother of four children and I live in the United States without any family for the last seventeen years. In August 2019, my husband left the house and we’re trying to get an agreement. We still did not get any of that. I tried to reach … the community Rabbi[ ] for help, and he said he will, and he got the get from my husband, but he is holding it for over a year now. The only way [the Chief Rabbi] can give it to me is by my husband permission. I’m seeking for help. I’m asking whoever can, please help me. To press [the Chief Rabbi] to let go of my get or to press my husband to give [the Chief Rabbi] the proof to give me the get. To release the get. Please, I really need this help. I want this get. I want this nightmare to be behind me. Whoever gonna help me, bracha [blessing] on his head.
This led to dozens of phone calls from strangers to the husband, and the husband said he feared it might lead to violence (which had sometimes happened to Jewish husbands who refused to give gets). The husband therefore sought and obtained a restraining order that
barred defendant from having “any oral, written, personal, electronic, or other form of contact or communication with [p]laintiff,” and specifically ordered defendant to “remove any and all posts from all social media platforms requesting the ‘get‘” and “cease and desist … creating and posting on all social media platforms.” …
The trial judge’s rationale was that the wife’s actions violated defendant’s right to privacy, and risked provoking some people to commit violence against the husband. The order was premised on a New Jersey statutory provision that labeled it illegal harassment to
with purpose to harass another, … [m]ake[], or cause[] to be made, one or more communications anonymously or at extremely inconvenient hours, or in offensively coarse language, or any other manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm.
But the appellate court held that this [final restraining order (FRO)] was unconstitutional, and I think this was correct, given NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, cited by the court….
It turns out, though, that there’s more of a First Amendment issue to the case, because the entire case—including the appellate briefing both from the parties and from the amici—had been sealed. Here’s what the N.J. intermediate appellate court said about that in a follow-up decision Thursday, written by Judge Greta Gooden Brown and joined by Judge Arnold Natali:
Given the subject matter, pursuant to a protective order, the record was sealed in the trial court as well as on appeal, and litigants were forbidden from disseminating any information about the case to the public. See N.J.S.A. 2C:25-33(a) (“All records maintained pursuant to [the PDVA] shall be confidential and s
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