By Tom Hals
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – Former Meta Platforms 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 her They said to preserve the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster of the Delaware Court of Chancery, said the evidence showed that Sandberg used a personal account under a pseudonym and deleted messages that were likely relevant to the shareholders’ lawsuit.
The sanction will make it more difficult for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid liability in the eight-day bench trial scheduled for April. The judge also ordered him to pay expenses related to the sanctions motion incurred by shareholders, including California’s huge teachers’ retirement system known as CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, the most sensitive and probative exchanges are likely to disappear,” Laster wrote in his opinion published Tuesday.
Meta and a lawyer for Sandberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandberg had argued that she was forthcoming about the personal account and rarely used it for business, and when she did, other messages were copied into the messages to preserve the information.
Laster imposed a higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” rather than “preponderance” of the evidence, for Sandberg’s affirmative defenses, which are her arguments and evidence for why she should not be held liable.
The case was presented in 2018, when it was learned that Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president of the United States in 2016, to access data on millions of users.
Shareholders sued the company’s directors and officers for allegedly harming investors by continually violating a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission to protect user data.
Shareholders also allege that the company’s board of directors negotiated to pay a larger fine of $5 billion to the FTC in 2019 so that founder Mark Zuckerberg would not be held personally accountable. Zuckerberg is expected to be deposed a second time before the start of the trial, according to court records.
In 2023, Laster refused to dismiss the lawsuit, which he said was a “case involving alleged wrongdoing on a truly 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 while on Meta’s board of directors. The judge said Zients’ messages were less relevant because he joined Meta’s board of directors in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was not a director of the company.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Leslie Adler)