A law firm opened by a former top advisor to Donald Trump helped a Utah conservative activist sue the state’s most politically active LGBTQ+ advocacy group, alleging he was fired from his job because the head of Equality Utah shared his anti-transgender comments with his previous boss.
Now the nonprofit is asking a judge to throw the case out, saying the point of the lawsuit is “to punish Equality Utah for calling out Plaintiff’s voluntary and public statements attacking members of Utah’s transgender community and their families.”
Goud Maragani, a previous Republican candidate for Salt Lake County clerk and the Utah Legislature, claims Equality Utah and its executive director, Troy Williams, “knowingly and recklessly portrayed Mr. Maragani in a false light to his employer through highly offensive statements, which caused such offense that his ... employer terminated him, leaving him with no job and a besmirched reputation in his legal career.”
The ex-GOP candidate is represented, in part, by attorneys with America First Legal Foundation — a self-described “right-wing nonprofit” led by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump.
Maragani has repeatedly made derogatory comments about transgender people and has spread misinformation about them while pushing for restrictions on gender-affirming health care and bathroom access for the transgender community.
And as the head of the Utah Gay-Straight Coalition and previously the now-dissolved Utah chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, a national organization of LGBTQ+ members of the Republican Party, Maragani, who is gay, has often made anti-transgender remarks and taken jabs at Equality Utah from the social media accounts of those organizations.
In Equality Utah’s filing last week, it wrote, “For years, Plaintiff has been an outspoken and caustic critic of the transgender community and its allies, arguing their mission is to ‘mutilate’ children, claiming they are ‘groomers,’ and declining to acknowledge transgender people’s identities. He has repeatedly and voluntarily injected himself into that debate, posting his opinions on social media, directly attacking Equality Utah for advocating for transgender rights, running for public office twice, and testifying at the legislature on bills affecting the LGBTQ community.”
While Equality Utah advocates against, and for adjustments to, proposed restrictions affecting transgender Utahns, it also offers diversity training for local businesses. Among those clients is Lucid Software, a Utah-based company valued at $3 billion where Maragani previously worked in its legal and compliance department.
“No basis in the law or the facts”
In an August 2023 email to a Lucid executive overseeing people and culture, which was included in court filings, Williams said, “I’m writing out of concern from a member of the Lucid team who has been engaging in disturbing behavior toward us. Goud Maragani is demonstrating a bizarre and disturbing obsession with me and our Equality Utah team.”
Williams expressed concern for the safety of a transgender leader at Equality Utah who was scheduled to conduct a training event at the company that month.
“Is Lucid going to be a safe environment for her? Can we jump on a call this week and talk through this? This is just a small sample of the bile that Gould [sic] regularly posts,” Williams wrote last August, continuing, “I’m very worried that his extreme transphobic rhetoric may also endanger transgender people throughout the state.”
In one thread from what was previously a Utah Log Cabin Republicans account, Maragani posted a picture of a woman on Equality Utah’s Transgender Advisory Council and said, “The ‘woman’ on the left is a biological man. Leave it to liberal white ladies to give him an award when his main accomplishment is trying to #erasewomen.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Goud Maragani as the Utah Republican Party holds its quarterly State Central Committee meeting in Sandy on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2023.
Another screenshot showed him criticizing a Democratic state senator for her views on transgender rights. He described Salt Lake City Sen. Jennifer Plumb, a pediatric emergency physician whose daughter is transgender, as “promoting the sterilization/mutilation of children,” and characterized her daughter as a child who was “born male & now identifies as your daughter.”
Lucid terminated Maragani last fall, two weeks after Williams sent another email, saying, “Goud is escalating his attacks.” In a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune in August, a spokesperson for Lucid wrote, “As stated in Mr. Maragani’s complaint, Lucid can confirm his termination was performance-related.”
Maragani alleges the action came as a result of Williams’ complaints, and that Williams “falsely connects tweets ... to ‘hate crimes’ in Utah.”
“He has no basis in the law or the facts for such a claim,” Equality Utah’s filing says, continuing, “he simply feels that when he was ultimately terminated by Lucid, it must have been related to his anti-transgender public agenda and Equality Utah’s attempts to prevent harassment of its employee.”
A new anti-SLAPP law
Equality Utah’s lawyers are arguing it is a SLAPP lawsuit — or a strategic lawsuit against public participation. People who bring such lawsuits typically don’t expect to win the case, but want to drain the defendant’s financial resources or intimidate them into silence.
A law the Utah Legislature passed last year allows defendants to ask a judge to dismiss a lawsuit if it is based on a person’s — or nonprofit entity’s — “exercise of the right of freedom of speech ... guaranteed by the United States Constitution or Utah Constitution, on a matter of public concern.”
Two of the attorneys retained by Equality Utah to defend itself helped advocate for that law’s passage.
“If Plaintiff wants to continue to attack the transgender community and the values it represents, he is free to do so,” Equality Utah’s filing reads. “What he is not entitled to do is hold someone liable for expressing a different opinion.”
Maragani did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing, nor did America First Legal.
In a statement posted to its website a week after The Salt Lake Tribune first reported on the case in August, America First Legal wrote, “Equality Utah’s false and defamatory claims about Mr. Maragani were intended to punish him for challenging woke gender ideology by destroying his reputation and legal career. But Mr. Maragani and others like him are no longer alone — America First Legal will keep fighting to protect decent Americans from woke intimidation.”
As a county clerk candidate, Maragani previously sought the LGBTQ+ advocacy group’s support. As a member of the Utah Republican Party’s State Central Committee, he later tried to censure Republican Salt Lake County Council member Aimee Winder Newton for attending an Equality Utah fundraiser and seeking the organization’s endorsement.
The 3-year-old America First Legal’s key purpose is to challenge policies enacted by President Joe Biden’s administration, Politico reported.
In recent months it has filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit challenging Biden’s expansion of Title IX to protect transgender students, sued over safeguards for transgender youth enacted in California and took legal action against a local school board in Virginia over policies that required students to address their classmates using their preferred pronouns.
