By Tom Hals
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – Meta Platforms’ former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, was sanctioned by a judge on Tuesday for deleting emails related to litigation over Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, despite being told to preserve the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, of Delaware Chancery Court, said evidence showed Sandberg used a private account under a pseudonym and erased messages that were likely relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.
The sanction will make it harder for Sandberg to inform her side of the story and avoid liability on the eight-day, non-jury trial scheduled for April. The judge also ordered her to pay the expenses related to the sanctions motion incurred by the shareholders, which include California’s huge teachers’ retirement system often called CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, it is probably going that probably the most sensitive and probative exchanges are gone,” Laster wrote in his opinion published on Tuesday.
Meta and an attorney for Sandberg didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Sandberg had argued she was forthcoming in regards to the personal account and infrequently used it for business and when she did, others were copied on the messages so the knowledge was preserved.
Laster imposed the next standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” slightly than “preponderance” of evidence, for Sandberg’s affirmative defenses, that are her arguments and evidence for why she mustn’t be held liable.
The case was brought in 2018, when it emerged that Facebook allowed data from thousands and thousands of users to be accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s successful campaign for U.S. president in 2016.
Shareholders sued the corporate’s directors and officers for allegedly harming investors by continually violating a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission to guard users’ data.
Shareholders also allege the corporate’s board bargained to pay a bigger high quality of $5 billion to the FTC in 2019 in order that founder Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have personal accountability. Zuckerberg is anticipated to be deposed for a second time before the beginning of the trial, in line with court records.
In 2023, Laster refused to dismiss the lawsuit, which he said was a “case involving alleged wrongdoing on a really colossal scale.”
Shareholders also asked Laster to sanction Jeffrey Zients, who was former President Joe Biden’s chief of staff and who also used and deleted personal emails when he was on Meta’s board. The judge said that Zients’ messages were less pertinent because he joined the Meta board in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was not an organization officer.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Leslie Adler)