By Tom Hals
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – The former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, Sheryl Sandberg, was fined in court on Tuesday for deleting emails related to a lawsuit over Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, despite being told to keep the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster of the Delaware Chancery Court, said evidence showed Sandberg used a personal account under a pseudonym and deleted messages that were likely relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.
The sanctions will make it harder for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid accountability in an eight-day non-jury trial scheduled for April. The judge also ordered her to pay expenses related to proposed sanctions imposed by shareholders, which include the massive California Teachers Retirement System known as CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, it is likely that the most sensitive and probative exchanges are gone,” Laster wrote in an opinion released Tuesday.
Meta and Sandberg's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandberg claimed she talked about the personal account and rarely used it for business, and when she did, the others were copied into the messages so the information was preserved.
Laster established a higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” rather than a “preponderance” of the evidence, for Sandberg's affirmative defense, which is her arguments and evidence why she should not be held liable.
The case arose in 2018 when it was revealed that Facebook had given access to data from millions of users to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump's successful 2016 US presidential campaign.
Shareholders sued the company's directors and officers for allegedly harming investors by repeatedly violating a 2012 Federal Trade Commission consent to protect user data.
Shareholders also say the company's board agreed to pay a larger $5 billion fine to the FTC in 2019 to avoid personal liability for founder Mark Zuckerberg. According to court records, Zuckerberg should be deposed a second time before the trial begins.
In 2023, Laster refused to dismiss the lawsuit, which he said was “a case involving alleged wrongdoing of a truly colossal scale.”
Shareholders also asked Laster to exonerate 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. The judge said Zients' reports were less relevant because he joined Meta's board 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)
