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The First Amendment protects speech about political affairs, even when officials — whether it’s your local mayor or the President of the United States — claim it’s false. That’s been true since America’s youth, when American jurors  a British governor’s attempt to use libel laws to censor a newspaper and Thomas Jefferson pushed back against the , which criminalized criticism of the government.

After Donald Trump comfortably won Iowa, pollster J. Ann Selzer owned up to the margin between her poll and the eventual outcome of Trump comfortably winning Iowa. She acknowledged the “biggest miss of my career” and did what good pollsters do: She explained her methodology and publicly shared the poll’s  (results reported out by demographic and attitudinal subgroups), its questionnaire (with  and ), and her , . 

Nevertheless, after Trump filed an abusive lawsuit against Selzer and The Des Moines Register, the “Center for American Rights” filed a tagalong, class action lawsuit against the pollster and the newspaper. In that lawsuit, plaintiff Dennis Donnelly claims that he and every subscriber to the Register is entitled to a refund of their subscription fees, arguing that newspapers can be held liable if polls don’t match later results and that readers can hold journalists and pollsters liable for “professional malpractice.”

Like the case brought by Trump, the class action lawsuit is a SLAPP — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, the legal tactic of filing a baseless lawsuit and forcing a defendant to spend time and money to get it dismissed. SLAPP suits are intended to make it costly to criticize the plaintiff (even if the plaintiff loses), chilling speech. While some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that deter such suits by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendants’ attorney’s fees, Iowa does not have such a statute.

FIRE came to Selzer’s defense, providing her with free legal representation to fight these bogus lawsuits. (You can read about the Trump lawsuit here.) In doing so, FIREis helping to mitigate the harm of SLAPPs by taking the cost of attorneys’ fees off the table. When you have to pay attorneys’ fees to defend your free speech, your speech is not free.