An unidentified party has submitted a Google deindexing request seeking to remove from search results more than a dozen web pages covering the court’s refusal to grant anonymity to a defendant in a New York sexual assault civil case, in a move that legal commentators say illustrates the growing use of search-suppression tools against unfavourable public-record material.
The Pseudonymity Ruling at the Centre of the Dispute
The case, Finley v. Przybylowski, was filed in the Southern District of New York on 23 May 2025 under docket number 1:25-cv-04383. The plaintiff alleged violent rape and sexual assault against the defendant, Thomas Przybylowski, then an associate at Pomerantz LLP, on the night they met as summer associates at separate New York law firms in May 2018. Przybylowski denied all allegations of non-consensual conduct.
Przybylowski sought to proceed under a pseudonym, citing the economic and reputational harm the lawsuit had already caused, including termination from his firm on 13 October 2025, and a fear that the proceedings would make future employment ‘nearly impossible.’ Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York declined. The court held that ‘the economic and reputational harms that Defendant has faced and may face as a party to this action, substantial though they may be, are outweighed by the public interest in access to judicial proceedings.’
The action was subsequently dismissed with prejudice following a motion brought by the plaintiff. A Justia-hosted opinion records Document 39 as granting Finley’s motion to dismiss. The court also ordered that certain filings containing the allegations be sealed, though it expressly refused to seal its own orders and opinions, stating that such material sits ‘at the core of the performance of the judicial function’ and that the parties’ privacy interests were insufficient to justify sealing judicial decisions already rendered.
The Google Deindexing Request and What It Targeted
Before the deindexing attempt, Przybylowski’s lawyer, a partner at a small but prominent law firm, wrote to Reason in July 2026 demanding removal of the original post reporting on the pseudonymity ruling. The letter argued that because the case had been dismissed and filings sealed, the covered material was ‘no longer part of the public record,’ and threatened ‘all available legal remedies,’ including injunctive relief and damages, if the post was not taken down by 27 July 2026.
Reason declined, on the basis that the court had expressly refused to seal the opinion being quoted, and that Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989) and related authority would in any event protect publication of lawfully obtained court material. No legal proceedings followed.
A short time after that refusal, the case docket and related coverage became the subject of the Google deindexing request, logged through the Lumen Database. The request sought removal from Google’s search results of fifteen URLs, including the Bloomberg Law report on the pseudonymity ruling, the Reason post itself, and several pages on Justia, CourtListener, Docket Alarm, Law360, Leagle, PacerMonitor, and CaseMine hosting opinions, docket pages, and archived court filings in the matter.
The Lumen Database, an independent research project managed by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, receives and publishes copies of takedown notices voluntarily shared by platforms including Google. It now hosts over 75 million notices referencing more than 10 billion URLs and grows by more than 200,000 notices per week. Google’s own policy, set out in its legal help pages, is that it does not share the requestor’s name or contact information when forwarding removal requests to Lumen, except in circumstances where there is high public interest following a case-by-case assessment.
The identity of the party who submitted the deindexing request has not been disclosed by Lumen. The request appears to have been unsuccessful: there is no current indication that Google acted to remove the targeted pages from its index. Reason’s author stated he had contacted Przybylowski’s lawyer twice requesting comment and had received no reply.
There is no legal obligation on Google to honour a deindexing request of this kind, and the court’s refusal to seal its own orders removes any arguable basis for a mandatory removal claim in respect of the pages reporting on those decisions. Subject to any further procedural step in the underlying matter, the pseudonymity ruling and the reporting on it remain publicly accessible online.
