Reporter subpoenaed for documents in securities fraud case

Roddy Boyd, editor and founder of the investigative reporting outlet Foundation for Financial Journalism, was ordered to turn over documents on Nov. 16, 2022, in connection with a California securities fraud lawsuit, according to court records reviewed by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

The case was ultimately dismissed in February 2023 as part of settlement negotiations in the underlying fraud case.

In January 2019, Boyd published an article through his Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation — renamed the Foundation for Financial Journalism in 2020 — alleging that pharmaceutical company Corcept Therapeutics paid doctors to prescribe its drug Korlym for off-label uses.

The revelations in Boyd’s article led to a decline in Corcept’s share price, company shareholders alleged in a securities fraud class-action suit filed two months later against the company and its top executives in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

As part of its defense, Corcept issued the November 2022 order to Boyd, commanding him to turn over a wide range of materials related to his newsgathering activities, his finances and those of his outlet, and any disciplinary actions against him. The subpoena demanded production of the documents by Dec. 12, 2022.

A separate subpoena to the Foundation for Financial Journalism on Oct. 27, 2022, asked the outlet to turn over similar information.

Corcept also issued a Nov. 30, 2022, order seeking Boyd’s testimony about topics listed in the two document subpoenas. Boyd filed a motion to quash that subpoena on Jan. 17, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, arguing that the information the defendants asked for was irrelevant to the lawsuit and protected by the First Amendment and the reporter’s privilege.

The motion to quash asserted that all parties to the suit agree that his article relied entirely on publicly available information, and that the subpoenas were merely “a transparent attempt to use the discovery process to chill Mr. Boyd’s speech.”

It also argued that the document subpoenas “make clear that Defendants do not know what they are looking for; rather, they are hoping to find something relevant to their case, while at the same time chilling journalists and others from further examination of Corcept’s business practices.”

On Feb. 13, Boyd withdrew his motion after Corcept dropped the deposition subpoena. U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz then dismissed the case Feb. 15.

Boyd told the Tracker in an email that the subpoenas “were designed to harass an established, credible, non-profit news organization.”

He also noted that legal actions or threats against small media outlets triggered a requirement to notify their insurer. “This places the press organization in a much higher risk cohort,” Boyd added, “guaranteeing their premiums and deductibles rise the following year.”