Court Grants Motion to Strike Deposition Transcript Using Its “Inherent Power”

“The Court agrees that inclusion of the entire deposition transcript served no proper purpose and accordingly grants the motion to strike.”  Lively v. Wayfarer Studios LLC, 2025 WL 2298247, at *1 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 8, 2025).

Defendants, the “Wayfarer Parties,” filed a letter asserting that there is no evidence that they participated in a smear campaign against Ms. Blake Lively.  Id. at *1. The court wrote:

For support, the Letter quotes one fragment of one sentence from Lively’s deposition. … In the deposition, Lively testifies that she believes that the Wayfarer Parties have retaliated against her for reporting harassment by engaging in an ongoing smear campaign, but she (appropriately) refuses to reveal information disclosed to her in confidence by her counsel. … The Letter also includes as an attachment the entire uncertified 292-page transcript of Lively’s deposition.

Id. at *1 (emphasis added).

Ms. Lively filed a motion pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(f) and the court’s inherent power to strike the attachment, asserting that “there is no conceivable legal purpose to file the whole transcript.” Id. The court wrote:

Lively argues that the Wayfarer Parties have included the entire transcript solely for strategic media and public-relations purposes. Specifically, given the Court’s individual practices regarding sealed materials, the Wayfarer Parties’ decision has put Lively in the position of “defend[ing] the continued sealing of the transcript.” … Lively contends the Wayfarer Parties have done so in order to “advance a false narrative that Ms. Lively is afraid of her deposition testimony becoming public, which is entirely untrue.”

The court used its common-law, inherent power to strike the transcript: “The Court agrees that inclusion of the entire deposition transcript served no proper purpose and accordingly grants the motion to strike.”  It added:

The Wayfarer Parties’ attachment of the entire, nearly 300-page deposition—after citing only two pages of it in the Letter—served no proper litigation purpose and instead appears to have been intended to burden Lively (and as a result, the Court) and to invite public speculation and scandal. Even if the cited deposition portions were relevant or provided support for the Wayfarer Parties’ arguments—both of which are far from clear—the Wayfarer Parties have not even attempted to argue that the entire deposition was relevant. Nor could they. The conclusion is inescapable that the Wayfarer Parties filed gratuitous amounts of irrelevant pages so that, if Lively moved for continued sealing of the irrelevant pages, the Wayfarer Parties could then use Lively’s response for their own public-relations purposes. The Court has not only the power but also the responsibility to step in.

Id. at *2 (emphasis added).

The court did not rely on Rule 12(f).  Under its common-law inherent power, it wrote that it could strike documents filed for improper purposes. Id. at *2.

[The Wayfarer Parties] contend that Lively has not asserted that “the deposition transcript contains ‘abusive,’ ‘improper’ or ‘libelous’ materials.” … But that is not the test. The test is whether the Wayfarer Parties’ filing itself was abusive or improper. And, given that there could have been no proper reason for the Wayfarer Parties to have filed an entire transcript when only a few lines were even arguably relevant, Lively has demonstrated that the Wayfarer Parties have abused this Court’s docket.

Id. (emphasis added).

In response to the Wayfarer Parties’ argument that filings are routine, the court wrote: “It is not routine, however, for parties to attach an entire confidential deposition transcript when citing only limited portions of that transcript involving only a few lines of text in order to put the other side and the Court to the burden of justifying continued sealing.”

For some background, please see:

• “It Ends With Us” (Apr. 8, 2025);
• Initial Disclosures Cannot Await Expert Opinions (Jul. 20, 2025);
• Party’s Motion to Quash Subpoena Denied for Lack of Standing (Jul. 2, 2025);
• Crime-Fraud Exception to Privilege Not Shown (Jun. 8, 2025).