Dellaportas v. Shahin, 1:24-cv-00793

This is a libel action between John Dellaportas (plaintiff) and Hana Shahin (defendant), stemming from alleged defamatory emails sent to numerous people falsely accusing Dellaportas of criminal and immoral conduct.
The disputed emails were sent from an anonymous Hotmail address (Rayvet40@hotmail.com), traced to the Netherlands, where Shahin has connections.
The primary discovery issue is identifying the Hotmail accountholder, information held by Microsoft, Hotmail's owner.
Dellaportas served Microsoft with a subpoena for non-content subscriber data under 18 U.S.C. § 2702, and preserved this data via a 2022 preservation letter.
Microsoft refused to comply, citing GDPR privacy restrictions, subpoena location issues, and claims of lacking some requested data.
The court scheduled a conference to address this discovery dispute.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Applicability of GDPR to Subpoena	GDPR allows transfer for legal claims (Art 49).	GDPR broadly prohibits disclosure without consent.	Not yet ruled.
Subpoena Place of Compliance	Microsoft does business in NYC; place is proper.	Location exceeds 100-mile rule under Rule 45(c).	Not yet ruled.
Possession of Requested Data	Preservation letter sent; lacking logs suggests spoliation.	Microsoft no longer has the IP logs.	Not yet ruled.
Need for Corporate Testimony	Testimony critical to scope of spoliation and data.	No data and thus no basis for testimony.	Not yet ruled.

Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Doe, 329 F.R.D. 518 (S.D.N.Y. 2019) (court commonly grants expedited discovery to identify John Doe defendants where plaintiff makes prima facie case and identification is not otherwise possible)
In re Hansainvest Hanseatische Investment-GmbH, 364 F. Supp. 3d 243 (S.D.N.Y. 2018) (GDPR does not prevent compliance with a federal subpoena for information stored in Europe)