Eight months before the Utah Supreme Court capped anti-SLAPP fees, a district judge already had
Equality Utah won its motion and asked for $272,000. Judge Kara Pettit gave it $65,450, on reasoning the Supreme Court would adopt the following spring.
On August 3, 2025, a judge in Salt Lake City signed a nine-page order that almost nobody read.
Equality Utah had won. Nine months earlier, Goud Maragani, a former Republican legislative candidate, had sued the organization, its foundation, and its executive director Troy Williams for defamation, false light, tortious interference, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The defendants moved to dismiss under Utah’s new anti-SLAPP law. In April, Third District Judge Kara Pettit granted the motion, finding the communications at issue concerned the parties’ differing public positions on transgender issues, that they were therefore on a matter of public concern, and that the statements were not defamatory.
Under the statute, that made the fee award mandatory. Section 78B-25-110 says a court shall award a prevailing moving party its costs, reasonable attorney fees, and litigation expenses “related to the motion.” Not may. Shall.
So Equality Utah’s lawyers filed for their fees. Through the end of April, three timekeepers had billed 542.5 hours on the case: 296.5 hours from one attorney, 217.9 from another, 28.1 from a third. The total came to $269,353.00 in fees and $2,823.75 in costs.
Pettit awarded $65,450.25.
The phrase nobody had defined
The whole question sits in four words. Fees are recoverable if they are “related to the motion.” Utah’s version of the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act took effect in May 2023, and by the summer of 2025 no Utah appellate court had said what that phrase reaches.
It is not a small ambiguity. Read one way, a defendant who wins a special motion recovers everything spent defending the case, because the motion disposed of the case and every hour was therefore related to it. Read the other way, the defendant recovers only what it cost to write and argue the motion itself.
The difference between those two readings, in this case, was about $207,000.
Pettit took the narrow view. Her order describes the work as having been performed “in the prosecution of a single motion,” and finds the results obtained “commensurate with the award.” She granted roughly twenty-four cents on the dollar.
A different judge, a different answer
Four months earlier and one district away, a court had gone the other direction.
Wayne Aston, a developer, had sued a weekly newspaper and its reporter for defamation after the city rejected his project. The Chronicle-Progress moved under UPEPA and won. The court then awarded $393,597.19 in fees and costs, which was the entire amount requested, covering essentially all the work performed in the litigation. The order found the full request reasonable and reasonably incurred related to the UPEPA motion.
Two district courts, the same statute, the same four words, opposite results. One paid the whole case. One paid the motion.
Aston appealed the fee award.
The Supreme Court sides with the narrow reading
On April 2, 2026, the Utah Supreme Court decided Aston v. Chronicle-Progress LLC. Addressing the question for the first time, it held that “related to the motion” limits recovery to expenses reasonably necessary to prosecute the special motion, not the entire litigation. The $393,597.19 award was reversed and remanded for recalculation against that standard.
Which is, in substance, what Pettit had done eight months earlier without any appellate authority to lean on.
There is no indication that the Supreme Court was aware of her order, and nothing here suggests it was following her. Trial court rulings in Utah are not published, are not indexed anywhere searchable, and do not circulate. That is precisely the point. A district judge worked out the correct answer to an open question of statutory interpretation, wrote it down, signed it, and it disappeared into a case file.
Why this matters to anyone filing one of these
Three practical things follow.
Bill as though the two are separate, because they are. If you are defending a case and expect to move under UPEPA, your time entries need to distinguish work on the special motion from work on the case generally. After Aston, an undifferentiated block of hours invites exactly the cut Equality Utah took.
The mandatory award is narrower than it sounds. “Shall award” is real, and it is one of the strongest features of Utah’s anti-SLAPP law. But it attaches to a defined and now-limited category of work. A client told the other side will pay their fees should understand which fees.
And expect the argument to be about proportion, not entitlement. Pettit’s order does not question that Equality Utah was owed fees. It weighs what the motion actually required against what was billed. That is the ground the fight will be on.
A note on what is not in this post
This piece describes the fee order and the Supreme Court’s later decision. It does not address the merits ruling, which was reported at the time as a dismissal without prejudice — a disposition that sits oddly against Section 78B-25-107(1), which makes dismissal under the act mandatory with prejudice. That is a separate question, and answering it requires the order rather than the coverage of it. We are working on that.
Sources: Motion for attorney fees, costs, and expenses, filed May 7, 2025; opposition filed May 21, 2025; Ruling, findings and order awarding costs, fees, and expenses, entered August 3, 2025, all in Maragani v. Equality Utah, Utah Third District Court. Order granting the motion for attorney fees, costs, and expenses, entered December 23, 2024, and the opinion in Aston v. Chronicle-Progress LLC, 2026 UT 7, decided April 2, 2026. Utah Code § 78B-25-110. All filings are in the document library.