North Carolina

This guide was authored by Zivile Raskauskaite, Skye Lucas, and Sara George, working with Professor Jared Schroeder at the Missouri School of Journalism. Grant support for this project was provided by the Society to Protect Journalists and the Reynolds Journalism Institute. 

Anti-SLAPP Protection: North Carolina does not have an anti-SLAPP statute. 

Helpful Cases: While North Carolina has no anti-SLAPP statute, these cases offer insight into how state courts have interpreted defamation cases against publishers. 

• Daniels v. Metro Magazine Holding Co., 634 S.E.2d 586 (N.C. Ct. App. 2006): Plaintiff, an insurance adjuster for Progressive, sued the defendant magazine and one of its editors for libel and other claims arising from an article that described the editor’s bad experience with plaintiff. The trial court dismissed the case for failure to state a claim, and was affirmed by the court of appeals. The court found that the contested statements were non-actionable because they were “clearly matters of personal opinion, or alternatively, hyperbole no reasonable reader would believe.”

• LaComb v. Jacksonville Daily News Co., 543 S.E.2d 219 (N.C. Ct. App. 2001): The lawsuit stems from an article published by defendant that reported plaintiffs had been charged with misdemeanor counts of “contributing to the delinquency of two minors.” After the article’s publication, the plaintiffs filed a defamation action against the publication, alleging the article wrongly suggested the arrest was for sexual activity with the two minors. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the newspaper. The decision was affirmed by a court of appeals, which held that the reporting of the arrests was “substantially accurate” under the conditional “fair report privilege.” The court of appeals acknowledged the arrest warrant to be “somewhat ambiguous,” and that “taken as a whole, the newspaper article is a substantially accurate report of the allegations in the arrest warrant.” 

Legislation: There have been a few attempts in North Carolina to introduce an anti-SLAPP bill modeled after the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. In 2023, House Bill 144 was approved by the Judiciary 1 Committee, before dying in the Rules Committee. A similar bill, House Bill 1017, died in 2022. 

Additional: While North Carolina doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP statute, North Carolina General Statute § 1D-45allows courts to award attorneys’ fees against a party that files a claim for punitive damages when they know or “should have known” the claim was frivolous or malicious.