CASE DISMISSED!: Court Grants Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss Because of Lack of Personal Jurisdiction

Hi TCPAWorld! My name is William Craddick. I’m an incoming attorney at Troutman Amin, and am looking forward to getting to know you all and sharing some legal insights.

If there is one thing you don’t forget in law school, it’s personal jurisdiction!

And we have a TCPA case on just that.

Personal jurisdiction refers to a court’s authority to issue a judgment against a person or entity in a lawsuit. And in every case, a court must have personal jurisdiction over a defendant.

If there is no personal jurisdiction, the case must be dismissed. Simple.

In this case, plaintiff, Kin Wah Kung, a resident of California, sued the Democratic National Committee, four individual politicians, a state political party, and two campaign committees in 2024 over unwanted political text messages he received in the months preceding the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The case, Kin Wah Kung v. Democratic National Committee, et al., No. 1:24-cv-03459 (TNM), 2025 WL 2959718 (D.D.C. 2025), was filed in the District of Columbia.

Kung apparently settled with some parties. After the settlement, four parties remained, collectively referred to as the “ActBlue” defendants

Shortly after the complaint was filed, the ActBlue defendants moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and failure to state a claim.

In order to sue a defendant, the forum state must have personal jurisdiction over the defendant.

No federal long-arm statue applied in Kung’s case, so the court could not assert personal jurisdiction over the defendants because they had “minimum contacts” within the District of Columbia. So the Court to turned to D.C. law and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to determine personal jurisdiction.

Both D.C law and the Due Process clause establish personal jurisdiction through two different forms – general and specific.

General jurisdiction in the District of Colombia is established “over a person domiciled in, organized under the laws of, or maintaining his or its principal place of business in, the District of Columbia as to any claim for relief.”

Here, the ActBlue defendants were incorporated in and had their principal place of business in Massachusetts. Even Kung conceded that the Actblue defendants could not satisfy these requirements. So – no general personal jurisdiction.

Now turning to specific personal jurisdiction, Kung would only be able to establish specific personal jurisdiction if both the District’s long-arm statute, D.C. Code § 13-423(a), and the Due Process Clause permits it.

Under the Due Process Clause, the ActBlue defendants must have sufficient “minimum contacts” within the District of Colombia. Per § 13-423(a), this means:

“1) transacting any business in the District of Columbia; (2) contracting to supply services in the District of Columbia; (3) causing tortious injury in the District of Columbia by an act or omission in the District of Columbia; (4) causing tortious injury in the District of Columbia by an act or omission outside the District of Columbia if he regularly does or solicits business, engages in any other persistent course of conduct, or derives substantial revenue from goods used or consumed, or services rendered, in the District of Columbia; (5) having an interest in, using, or possessing real property in the District of Columbia; (6) contracting to insure or act as surety for or on any person, property, or risk, contract, obligation, or agreement located, executed, or to be performed within the District of Columbia at the time of contracting, unless the parties otherwise provide in writing; or (7) marital or parent and child relationship in the District of Columbia (in certain circumstances).”

Essentially, Kung would have had to establish that a number of these elements were satisfied by the facts of his case.

Kung argued that ActBlue did business in the district because entities associated with the defendants had registered there for that purpose. But the Court found this was not enough to establish personal jurisdiction. Kung would have also had to offer some kind of theory explaining how ActBlue’s business in the District of Columbia was related to texts he received while residing in California. He did not do this. In fact, all ActBlue seemed to have done in connection with the text messages was operate the donation website.

Kung could have also alleged that he suffered tortious injury in the District of Columbia, satisfying subsections (a)(3) and (a)(4) of D.C. Code § 13-423(a). He failed to do this as well. Even if Kung had satisfied the statute, the Due Process Clause would still preclude him from establishing specific personal jurisdiction because the ActBlue defendants were not “essentially at home” in the forum, meaning that the lawsuit arose from their activity within the District of Colombia. Kung’s claims were simply not related in any way to the forum where he had originally brought his complaint.

As a hail mary, Kung had requested that the court allow him to at least conduct discovery to establish personal jurisdiction. But, the court also denied this because Kung hadn’t shown that he could actually supplement his jurisdictional allegations, which the court said were conclusory and would amount to a fishing expedition. Therefore, the ActBlue defendants’ motion to dismiss was granted, without prejudice. Kung, who represented himself on his own behalf in this case, maybe should have just hired an attorney.

Kung’s mistakes provide defendants with a useful opportunity to think about personal jurisdiction and highlights how early action to address issues with a plaintiff’s complaint can result in serious wins for parties seeking to oppose.