The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will be forced to open its books and reveal its sources of funding after a defamation suit it filed against a former employee completely backfired.US Magistrate Judge David Schultz ruled Monday that CAIR’s donors, funding sources — potentially including foreign ones — and any assets owned by the group are all within the “scope of permissible discovery” as part of former chapter leader Lori Saroya’s lawsuit against the controversial Muslim rights group.
What happened was that Saroya was a senior member of CAIR and even a member of its board of directors. She resigned from CAIR in 2018 and then started posting about how awful the organization is, accusing it of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, union busting, financial mismanagement, lack of board oversight, board incompetence, creating a hostile work environment, negatively portraying Muslims, making mistakes on legal cases, receiving foreign funding, and withholding money it owed her.
CAIR sued her for defamation. When the judge asked CAIR to amend the lawsuit to specify what she said that damaged the organization, CAIR dropped the case.
But then CAIR issued a press release accusing Saroya of cyberstalking, as well as claiming that the judge ruled in their favor before they dropped the case and that Saroya's lawsuit had no merit. In that press release, CAIR said the only reason it dropped the case was "Lori’s attorneys were using the discovery process to overwhelm our chapters, drain their resources, and even demand the names of CAIR supporters who have donated to us, among other private information that anti-Muslim groups have long wanted to acquire. We would never risk letting the community’s information fall into the hands of Lori or anti-Muslim groups. "
This opened the door for Saroya to sue CAIR - and, significantly, to force the group to open its books to see exactly what CAIR said it didn't want the world to see, where it gets its funding from, since CAIR accused her of lying about their getting money from known terror-linked organizations.
It's also funny that CAIR is accusing Saroya of being anti-Muslim. There is a website set up by Muslims that discusses CAIR's ethical and legal lapses and general sketchiess.
This is going to be fun.
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