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 being told to keep the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, of the Delaware Court of Chancery, said evidence showed Sandberg used a personal account under a pseudonym and deleted messages likely to be relevant to the shareholders' lawsuit.
The sanction will make it more difficult for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid accountability in the eight-day non-jury trial scheduled for April. The judge also ordered her to pay the expenses associated with the sanctions motion drawn by the shareholders, which includes California's massive teachers' retirement system known as CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, it is likely that the most sensitive exchanges and evidence disappeared,” Laster wrote in his opinion published Tuesday.
Meta and Sandberg's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandberg had argued that she was coming for the personal account and that she rarely used it for business and when she did, others were copied on the messages so that the information was preserved.
Laster set a higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” rather than a “preponderance” of evidence, for Sandberg's affirmative defenses, namely her arguments and evidence as to why she should not be liable.
The case was brought in 2018, when it emerged that Facebook had 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 from 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 consumer data.
Shareholders also claim that the company's board bargained to pay a larger fine of $5 billion to the FTC in 2019 so that founder Mark Zuckerberg would not have personal liability. Zuckerberg is expected to be deposed for a second time before the trial begins, according to court records.
In 2023, Laster refused 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 used and deleted personal emails when he was on the Meta board. The judge said Zients' messages were less relevant because he joined Meta's board in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was not a company official.
(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Leslie Adler)