Askar / stock.adobe.com
A Catholic pro-life woman in Florida has successfully retrieved the last of her data from Google after the tech giant de-platformed her and suspended her email account in 2023 when she sent a pro-life email.
Thomas More Society, the nonprofit legal organization that represented Trudy Perez-Poveda in the suit, stated in a news release that her data, which had been withheld from her for nearly two years, “suddenly became inexplicably accessible” just days before a court-ordered settlement deadline. Perez-Poveda has since dismissed the lawsuit against Google.
Perez-Poveda sued Google last summer after the company alerted her that it had locked her out of her email account but did not provide a reason for the suspension, CatholicVote previously reported. The notice came about an hour after she sent an email to her pro-life group, Family for Life, inviting them to a Catholic event outside an abortion facility.
Five days later, Google informed Perez-Poveda that her account had been permanently disabled because she breached its acceptable use policy. While acknowledging that the 11 years’ worth of data stored in the account was legally hers, the company also informed her that there was no way to restore the data, which included contacts, emails, photos, notes, and documents.
According to the release, Perez-Poveda was able to regain some data by using third-party tech experts, but until recently, the large bulk of it was still held by Google.
Matt Heffron, senior counsel at Thomas More Society, stated in the release that Google has dragged 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.”
“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,” he added.
Perez-Poveda celebrated her win in the release, stating, “Big tech companies cannot be allowed to decide what speech is acceptable.”
