Far Northwest Side Ald. Jim Gardiner, 45th, has agreed to pay more than $157,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed by six Northwest Side residents who accused the alderman of violating their First Amendment rights when he blocked them and deleted their comments on his official government social media account.
The lawsuit, filed in June 2021, claimed Gardiner “routinely hides or deletes comments that criticize him or his policies” on the Facebook page tied to his elected office and accused the alderman of banning at least four people from the page.
In a September 2023 ruling, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman determined Gardiner should have known the actions “ran afoul of the First Amendment” and she ordered Gardiner to stop blocking users and restricting comments. Her decision also called for a trial to determine damages.
In the settlement reached last week, Gardiner did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to pay the six plaintiffs $157,500, an amount the plaintiffs’ attorney, Adele Nicholas, said may be the largest for any case related to the handling of a public official’s social media.
“Social media sites like Facebook provide the public a powerful tool to petition their elected officials and make their voices heard,” Nicholas said in a statement. “Elected officials can’t selectively ban people who disagree with them.”
Each of the plaintiffs — Peter Barash, Pete Czosnyka, Steve Held, Dominick Maino, James Suh and Adam Vavrick — will receive $4,000 from the settlement, while $133,500 will be used to pay their attorneys’ fees and legal costs, according to a copy of the agreement.
The agreement came after the U.S. Supreme Court, in an unrelated case, rejected the legal framework that Johnson Coleman used in making her 2023 ruling. The high court’s decision reset much of the progress that had been made in the Gardiner case.
It is unclear how much of the settlement will be paid by Gardiner and how much will be paid by city taxpayers. Neither Gardiner nor the Johnson administration responded to questions about how much the city will pay, and Nicholas said she too did not know.
Gardiner said Monday that his staff had sought guidance from Steve Berlin, executive director of the city’s Board of Ethics, in regard to his social media maneuvers.
“My office was advised to block due to doxxing and the nature of harassing comments by certain followers,” Gardiner wrote in a statement. “Doxxing” refers to the practice of sharing another person’s private information online with malicious intent.
The board shared an advisory opinion in January 2019 that said comments cannot be deleted and users cannot be blocked on elected officials’ pages because of the First Amendment, but added that such social media regulation “is a fluid area of law” and that the board should be consulted before aldermen take action.
According to the lawsuit, Gardiner deleted comments made by Czosnyka, one of the plaintiffs, that accused the alderman of harassing women and constituents, but that the alderman did not delete similar comments made by others about Czosnyka.
Gardiner’s former staffer Tanya King testified in a deposition that Gardiner ultimately blocked Czosnyka because of “personal grudge issues” and had described Czosnyka as a “rat” that he was going to “eradicate,” according to court records filed by the plaintiffs. King also testified Gardiner selectively chose evidence and left out context when he consulted the city’s Board of Ethics on blocking Czosnyka.
The alderman later posted to his official Facebook page a now-deleted video in which Gardiner stood in front of Czosnyka’s house and referred to Czosnyka as one of his “biggest fans.” The act was described by King as an effort of “targeting” that revealed where Czosnyka lived, according to the records.
Gardiner told the Tribune Monday the accusation he selectively shared information with the Board of Ethics is “patently false.”
The alderman also deleted a comment on the Facebook page by Vavrick criticizing Gardiner’s vote against an ordinance to prohibit Chicago police from cooperating with Immigrants and Customs Enforcement. The comment was made on a Holocaust Remembrance Day post Gardiner shared, and Vavrick, who the lawsuit identified as a descendent of Holocaust survivors, accused Gardiner of hypocrisy. Among other deletions, Gardiner also hid a comment from Barash calling on the alderman to host “Ward Nights” open to constituents.
Many of the comments Gardiner deleted or blocked people over were critical, but all were “perfectly appropriate,” Nicholas told the Tribune Monday.
“The First Amendment protects everybody, including people who the government would rather not hear from,” Nicholas said.
In October 2023, the Board of Ethics fined Gardiner $20,000 for 10 violations of the city’s ethics code when he hatched a plan to issue citations to the “home of a constituent who had been publicly critical of the alderperson.” The man was Czosnyka, who successfully fought off a $675 ticket for excessive weeds.
