Florida pro-lifer wins data back from Google after lawsuit

A Florida woman who fought to get her data back from Google after it deactivated her account because she sent a pro-life email has succeeded.

Key Takeaways:

• Trudy Perez-Poveda has retrieved all of her data — including stored emails, photographs, calendars and contacts — from Google, after the tech giant deactivated her account last year.

• A 2024 lawsuit filed on behalf of Perez-Poveda contends that her account was deactivated because she is a pro-life activist.

• The law firm representing Perez-Poveda, the Thomas More Society, has decided to drop the remainder of its lawsuit against Google now that she has retrieved her data.

The Backstory:

In July 2024, 76-year-old Trudy Perez-Poveda filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company locked her out of her account hours after she sent an email to her pro-life group. In that email, she announced plans for a peaceful Catholic Mass and prayer gathering in front of A Woman’s Choice abortion business in Jacksonville, Florida.

In deactivating her account, Google also refused to allow her access to more than 11 years of her stored emails, photographs, calendars, contacts, and other data.

Perez-Poveda was told that her account was permanently disabled for violating Google’s acceptable use policy, though it never specified her actual infractions against the policy.

Perez-Poveda was represented by attorneys from the Thomas More Society, who contended that she was censored for her pro-life beliefs.

The Details:

In a July 31 statement, the Thomas More Society announced that Perez-Poveda has now received access to all her Google data. According to her lawyers, Google was difficult to work with in the process, repeatedly giving her “tools” to retrieve her data though tech experts found those tools to be “unworkable.”

The law firm reports (emphases added):

Recently, within days of a court-imposed settlement deadline in this lawsuit, all of Mrs. Perez-Poveda’s data suddenly became inexplicably accessible for the first time since this controversy began. An IT expert confirmed that something done on Google’s end allowed this to happen, one year and 10 months after Google first locked out Mrs. Perez-Poveda from the use of her own data.

“Google has dragged Trudy Perez-Poveda through a land of smoke and mirrors, apparently because she was a pro-lifer who had the fortitude to stand up to Google and demand what belonged to her,” said Matt Heffron, Senior Counsel at the Thomas More Society. “Google did not know who they were messing with when they decided to pick on Trudy. She was not going to let a big-tech behemoth shut down her life-saving mission to protect the unborn.”

“Thanks to the support from Thomas More Society, I was able to regain access to more than a decade worth of personal data and continue my mission to save lives in our Jacksonville community. Big tech companies cannot be allowed to decide what speech is acceptable,” Perez-Poveda said.

The Bottom Line:

The law firm has decided to drop the rest of the lawsuit against Google, now that Perez-Poveda has received access to her files.

“The main goal of this lawsuit was to get Trudy’s data back and we accomplished that,” said Heffron. “The lawsuit also sought damages for what Google put Trudy through, and we had wanted to test Florida’s untried anti-censorship statute to that end. At this point, though, we decided it would be more efficient to refer the matter to the Florida Attorney General’s Office and to work with Florida legislators to strengthen gaps we discovered in the anti-censorship statute. With that in mind, we dismissed the remainder of the lawsuit.”

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