Q: Is my online news site required to take down a previously posted deed transfer notice if the person involved has enrolled in a victim protection program in Pennsylvania?
A: A member news organization recently fielded an unusual request. A woman identified as the purchaser in a routine county deed-transfer notice the news site had published online contacted the newsroom, explained that she had an active “Stop Order” with her county sheriff’s office tied to a stalking situation, and asked the paper to remove the posting. The sheriff’s office confirmed the order existed.
The Legal Baseline
Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s long-standing rule from Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, once a government places truthful information into an official record open to public inspection, it cannot later punish the press for publishing that information. The responsibility for keeping sensitive information out of public records sits with government, not with publishers.
Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co. crystallized the operative test: a publisher that lawfully obtains truthful information on a matter of public significance cannot be punished for publishing it unless a state can show a narrowly tailored law serving an interest of the highest order.
In Florida Star v. B.J.F., a sexual assault victim suffered real, documented harm, including threats and a forced relocation, after a newspaper published her name from a police report. The Supreme Court still held the paper could not be held liable, reasoning that government has far better tools, such as classification, redaction, and restricted access, to prevent sensitive information from becoming public than courts have to punish a publisher after the fact.
The Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, applied the same framework in Bowley v. City of Uniontown Police Department, protecting a newspaper that published a juvenile’s arrest even though the information reached the paper through an official’s unlawful disclosure. A later Third Circuit decision, Schrader v. District Attorney of York County, reinforced the point: once sensitive information enters public circulation, the government can rarely claw it back, and the narrowly tailored remedy is protecting the information at the source rather than punishing whoever republishes it.
Pennsylvania’s Victim Protection Statutes
Pennsylvania’s Address Confidentiality Program, the Protection From Abuse Act’s address-nondisclosure provisions, and the Protection From Abuse Act address-nondisclosure provisions bind government agencies, courts, and law enforcement, not private publishers. Pennsylvania’s own privacy-tort case law treats information already sitting in an official public record as outside the “private facts” that a publicity-based privacy claim is meant to protect.
Industry Practice
Legal clearance is often not the end of the conversation. Many papers choose to go beyond their legal floor when a credible, documented safety concern comes in: verifying the claim, redacting just the address rather than removing the whole item, and pointing the requester toward the state’s address-confidentiality program for future transactions. A written, consistently applied policy for handling these requests protects both the newsroom’s editorial independence and its relationship with the community it covers.
As always, this is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as legal advice. News media organizations should contact private counsel or the PNA Legal Hotline at (717) 703-3080 with concerns about the content of a particular political advertisement.