Every primary filing in Kavanaugh v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., indexed with dates, parties, and a one-paragraph summary. Reviewed by Wiki World News editorial; all documents are on the public record.
The reference version of the Wikipedia article on Mr. Kavanaugh that the August 2025 demand letter asks the Wikimedia Foundation to restore. The closest archived Wayback Machine snapshot is from April 20, 2021. Reproduced under Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 4.0 license at /kavanaugh-2021. Forensic comparison to the current article at /kavanaugh-diff.
Public · ArchivedThe complaint alleges that beginning in November 2021, two anonymous Wikipedia editors using the handles “Throast” and “Popoki35” began a coordinated rewrite of Mr. Kavanaugh's Wikipedia article. Wikipedia's own authorship-tracking tools show the two together authored approximately 79 percent of the current article's content. Of the 92 footnoted sources on the page as of last summer, 69 were retrieved between November 2021 and February 2022; expanding the window to the full period of Ethan Klein's anti-Kavanaugh content brings the total to 80 of 92 sources, or 86 percent.
YouTube personality Ethan Klein signs a sworn declaration acknowledging that he “caused, influenced, encouraged, and indirectly helped coordinate the attack with both of the aforementioned editors” and that the editors “did [it] for compensation.”
The changes to Kavanaugh's Wikipedia page were not neutral. I am aware that all changes made by both of those editors were done with the intent to harm, defame, discredit, and mislead readers about Mr. Kavanaugh.
Exhibit AMr. Kavanaugh's outside counsel at Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch LLP delivers a 20-page demand letter to Stephen LaPorte, the Wikimedia Foundation's general counsel, attaching the Klein declaration. The letter asks Wikimedia to restore the page to its May 17, 2021 version and to ban Throast and Popoki35 from the platform. The letter quotes from each of Wikipedia's own published policies (biographies of living persons, conflicts of interest, neutral point of view, paid editing, harassment, vandalism) and matches them against specific edits.
According to the complaint, Wikimedia took neither requested action. The page was not restored. The editors were not banned.
The complaint alleges damages in the billion-dollar range, asserts that Mr. Kavanaugh has lost “dozens of deals, including several valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, solely because of the vandalism on his Wikipedia page,” and seeks injunctive relief restoring the article to its pre-November-2021 state.
The complaint attaches the Klein declaration as Exhibit A and incorporates by reference the 20-page demand letter and the page-history evidence from Wikipedia's own tools.
Public docketThe Foundation's demurrer makes three principal arguments: (1) that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act bars every claim, however styled, that “seeks to hold Wikimedia liable as the speaker or publisher of user-generated content”; (2) that the donor-facing language on Wikipedia's fundraising page about creating accurate pages and undoing vandalism is “aspirational” rather than a promise; and (3) that the word “trustworthy” itself is, as a matter of law, “inherently subjective and unquantifiable” puffery on which no reasonable person would rely.
Trustworthy, moreover, is inherently subjective and unquantifiable. Court after court has rejected as ‘puffery’ claims based on that word.
The demurrer compares Wikipedia's donor-page language to the New York Times's slogan “All the News That's Fit to Print” — “a phrase no reasonable reader would view as anything more than aspirational.”
Public docketThe hearing on the Wikimedia Foundation's demurrer. The court will hear argument on Section 230, the “aspirational” characterization of the donor-page language, and the puffery defense applied to the word “trustworthy.” The court may rule from the bench or take the matter under submission for written ruling within typical 10-30 day windows.
UpcomingEditorial note Wiki World News maintains this case file as a public reference. The complaint, demurrer, and other filings are on the public court docket; the Klein declaration is on the public record as Exhibit A to the complaint. Where we summarize a filing, we cite the filing. Where the demand letter or the complaint quotes language from another source, we reproduce the quoted language verbatim with attribution. For our full editorial coverage of the case, see /kavanaugh-wikimedia-lawsuit.