Mathews v. McCown

• Court: Utah Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: Associate Chief Justice Pearce
• Citation: Mathews v. McCown, 2025 UT 34, 575 P.3d 1114 (Utah 2025)
• Docket Number: 20230662
• Decision Date: 14 August 2025
• Parties: Kyle MATHEWS and Ryan Sorensen, Appellants, v. Charles MCCOWN, Camille Higgins, and Jay Nielsen, Appellees.

575 P.3d 1114

2025 UT 34

Kyle MATHEWS and Ryan Sorensen, Appellants,

v.Charles MCCOWN, Camille Higgins, and Jay Nielsen, Appellees.

No. 20230662

Supreme Court of Utah.

Heard December 9, 2024

Filed August 14, 2025

Third District Court, Tooele County, The Honorable Teresa L. Welch, No. 220301601

Janet M. Conway, Wanship, Timothy C. Houpt, C. Michael Judd, Salt Lake City, for appellants

Steve H. Bergman, Yuchen Cook, Salt Lake City, for appellee Charles McCown

Robert E. Mansfield, Megan E. Garrett, Salt Lake City, for appellee Camille Higgins

Brent N. Bateman, J. Tayler Fox, Justin T. Rich, John Tipton, Salt Lake City, for appellee Jay Nielsen Associate Chief Justice Pearce authored the opinion of the Court, in which Justice Petersen, Justice Hagen, Justice Pohlman, and Judge Tenney joined.

Associate Chief Justice Pearce, opinion of the Court:

INTRODUCTION

¶1 Before January 2022, Erda was an unincorporated area of Tooele County. The record before us does not reveal whether Erda was a peaceful idyll before residents startec exploring the idea of incorporation. But the record undoubtedly reflects a community awash in litigation since incorporation efforts began. Several lawsuits have been filed, and the public dialogue has been, at least at times, rife with accusations of fraud and mis deeds. This appeal arises out of those accusations.

¶2 Kyle Mathews and Ryan Sorensen (Appellants) sued Camille Higgins, Jay Nielsen and Charles McCown (Appellees).¹ Appellants alleged that Appellees defamed them— and committed the tort of invasion of privacy/false light (false light)—when they publicly accused Appellants of a variety of bad acts in connection with Erda’s incorporation There is no question Appellees made the statements. But Higgins and Nielsen, who each filed a motion to dismiss, asserted that the statements were not capable of defamatory meaning and were privileged. McCown for his part, claimed that his statements were protected because he made them while par ticipating in the process of government. He filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings based on Utah’s Citizen Participation in Government Act, which is also known as the Anti-SLAPP Act.

¶3 The district court granted Appellees’ motions. The court concluded that Higgins’s and Nielsen’s “statements were made in the context of a public debate regarding the incorporation of Erda” and were therefore not capable of defamatory meaning. The court also ruled that the statements were privileged. The court dismissed Appellants’ false light claims against Higgins and Nielsen for the same reasons. The court additionally concluded that the Anti-SLAPP Act protected McCown from the claims asserted against him and granted his motion for judgment on the pleadings.

¶4 Appellants contend that the district court erred when it ruled that Higgins’s and Nielsen’s statements were not capable of defamatory meaning and were subject to qualified privileges. They argue that the district court incorrectly concluded that they failed to adequately plead their false light claims against Higgins and Nielsen. And they assert that the district court misinterpreted the Anti-SLAPP Act to hold that it shielded McCown from liability.

¶5 We see merit in Appellants’ arguments. At least some of Higgins’s and Nielsen’s statements are capable of defamatory meaning. And the district court, on motions to dismiss, should not have dismissed the claims on privilege grounds. The district court also erred when it relied on those rationales to dismiss the false light claims. Finally, the Anti-SLAPP Act does not apply to McCown’s statements. We reverse and remand.

BACKGROUND²

Incorporation of Erda

[1, 2] ¶6 According to the complaint, efforts to incorporate Erda began as early as 2018. Appellants were involved in those efforts. Mathews founded the Erda Community Association (ECA), an organization that helped sponsors place a ballot measure to incorporate Erda before voters. Mathews “worked actively—but quietly—in assisting sponsors of a ballot measure to incorporate the City of Erda.” Sorensen served as one of five incorporation sponsors and as an ECA board member.

¶7 In October 2018, incorporation proponents submitted a feasibility study request to the Lieutenant Governor. This included a proposed map of Erda and signatures from property owners in the proposed incorporation area. The Lieutenant Governor asked the proponents to make certain boundary adjustments, amend the map, and gather additional signatures.

¶8 Appellants then met with various Erda property owners. Mathews met with John and Mark Bleazard and showed them the amended map. That map included land referred to as the “Six Mile property,” which the Bleazards, among others, owned. The Bleazards signed the feasibility study request in late December 2018. Sorensen met with Judy Warr, who also owned property included in the amended map, and she, too, signed the feasibility study request.

¶9 The incorporation sponsors submitted the amended map, with the additional signatures, in January 2019. Between January and August 2019, the Lieutenant Governor’s office sought to verify that the signatories had signed on behalf of their respective ranch properties, as the amended map depicted. The Lieutenant Governor’s office made multiple efforts to confirm that with the Bleazards. In August 2019, the Lieutenant Governor’s office certified the request for a feasibility study.

¶10 By February 2020, the feasibility study had been completed, allowing proponents to proceed with the incorporation ballot measure. In November 2020, voters approved Erda’s incorporation.

Six Mile Ranch Company Lawsuits and Community Discussion

¶11 Shortly after the ballot measure passed, the Six Mile Ranch Company (Six Mile) filed a lawsuit challenging Erda’s incorporation. The lawsuit named multiple individuals as defendants, including Appellants. The complaint alleged that one or more of the defendants had fraudulently modified the feasibility study request to make it appear as if the Bleazards signed on behalf of the Six Mile property instead of as individual property owners.

¶12 Someone uploaded a copy of Six Mile’s complaint to a community Facebook group called “Erda Neighbors.” Another person commented that Six Mile’s lawsuit was baseless.³

¶13 Higgins, an Erda resident and relative of the Bleazards, responded to that post. In December 2020, she wrote that “the same people who committed/participated in the fraudulent actions referred to in this complaint are the same people who will be deciding the formation of an Erda City government & voting districts.” She continued that “it looks like Incorporation Sponsors literally used & benefited [sic] from my relatives’ property by doctoring a signature page so they could make the required land mass necessary for the feasibility study to even take place.”⁴

¶14 In December 2021, Ron Hatfield, Nielsen’s business partner, posted a link in Erda Neighbors to a change.org petition that he had created to stop “a group of really bad people.” Hatfield wrote that he “and a group of landowners . . want these mean people to quit their illegal maneuvering and under-the-table activity. With this petition we want the Lt. Governor to NOT OVERLOOK their filegal acts and hold them to the law …. The whole city is divided by these nut cases.”⁵

¶15 In the online petition’s comments section, Nielsen, an Erda property owner, wrote that “[t]he Erda sponsors committed fraud which was well documented and part of lawsuits against the Lieutenant Governor’s office because the former director of elections was pushed into accepting those doctored documents, which he had told them were not acceptable.”

¶16 That same month, Higgins, Nielsen, and McCown, also an Erda resident, made additional statements about Six Mile’s lawsuit and Erda’s incorporation. In the Erda Neighbors group, for example, Nielsen posted a link to Six Mile’s first complaint with instruction to “[r]ead about the well documented fraud here.”

¶17 In a different Facebook group, “Erda City 411,” McCown posted an email he sent to the Utah State Elections Office, in which he stated that sponsors did a “pen and ink alteration”—a “forgery and a fraud in the opinion of a large portion of the population of the area.” And Higgins posted the following in Erda Neighbors:

Six Mile did not sign for the feasibility study. Two owners signed under the pretense-told to them by the sponsors—that they were signing for their individually owned properties in East Erda. Not for Six Mile Ranch properties. You can look up their affidavits if you’d like their full testimonies … the suit was dismissed because the election had already happened & because the plaintiffs filed as an incorporation & not as individuals. The dismissal does not negate the sworn affidavits submitted by the landowners stating the misuse of their signatures & property used by the sponsors to dilute the tax vs land mass ratio required to incorporate.

¶18 McCown then sent letters to some Erda residents, in which he requested their support for a petition to dissolve Erda. The letters directed readers to his website:

freeerda.com. In the letters, McCown also stated that the ECA is the group behind all of the referendums and some of the lawsuits that have created severe division and strife in our community. They are the reason we do not have a temple in Erda …. The same group, by and large, were also the sponsors of the City of Erda campaign. Their stated goals were simply to control the zoning of Erda … In my heart, if all of the electorate knew of the rulebreaking, fraud and forgery that went into the feasibility study, there is no way it would have passed.

¶19 In February 2022, the month after Erda received its certificate of incorporation, Six Mile filed a second lawsuit against several people, including Appellants. This lawsuit prompted additional online discussion. McCown, for example, made several statements about the case in Erda City 411. He said that he was “...