Much has been written about the recent Florida Supreme Court case of Delmonico v.
Traynor, which declined to extend Florida’s long standing absolute litigation privilege to statements made by an attorney during ex-parte, out of court questioning of a nonparty witness. Recently I came across an interesting twist on Traynor that will hopefully require the courts to revisit the scope of the absolute privilege.
The Traynor decision dealt with a defamation claim and since the facts of Traynor are well laid out here, they won’t be addressed in this post. It should be noted that defamation was one of the historical torts that the absolute privilege was intended to protect – libel and slander being the others.



