Written by Tom Hales
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – A judge on Tuesday imposed sanctions on Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:), for deleting emails related to litigation over Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, despite her demands to preserve the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster of the Delaware Court of Chancery, said evidence showed that Sandberg used a personal account under a pseudonym and deleted messages potentially relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.
The punishment will make it difficult for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid liability in the eight-day trial without a jury scheduled for April. The judge also ordered it to pay expenses related to the penalty claim incurred by shareholders, which include California's massive teacher retirement system known as CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, the most sensitive and provable exchanges likely disappeared,” Luster wrote in his opinion published Tuesday.
Meta and Sandberg's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandberg said she was upfront about the personal account and rarely used it at work, and when she did, other accounts were copied over the messages so the information was preserved.
Laster imposed a higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” rather than a “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 brought in 2018, when it emerged that Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica to access the data of millions of users, a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's successful campaign for President of the United States in 2016.
Shareholders sued the company's directors and officers for allegedly harming investors by continuing to violate a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission to protect user data.
Shareholders also allege that the company's board agreed to pay a larger $5 billion fine to the FTC in 2019 so that founder Mark Zuckerberg would not be personally liable. Zuckerberg is expected to be impeached for a second time before the trial begins, according to court records.
In 2023, Luster declined to dismiss the lawsuit, which he said was “a case involving alleged wrongdoing on a truly massive 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 he was on Meta's board. The judge said Zients' messages were less significant because he joined Meta's board in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was not an official at the company.
