Goodell v. Moulton

Maggie Moulton sued her ex-boyfriend William Goodell, claiming he gave her genital herpes without telling her he was infected. When she sought his medical records and provider information in discovery, Goodell refused, citing the Georgia Constitution's right to privacy. A trial court sided with Goodell and denied Moulton's request. The Court of Appeals of Georgia disagreed, saying the hearing Goodell got was enough protection for his privacy right, and sent the case back for the trial court to decide which records Moulton could get. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed Goodell has a genuine privacy interest in his medical records under its 1905 Pavesich decision, but rejected both lower courts' approaches. It held that courts must directly balance Goodell's privacy interest against Moulton's need for the records and the public's interest, rather than treating a hearing alone as sufficient or applying the rigid strict scrutiny test Goodell wanted. The case goes back for that balancing to happen.

The Georgia Constitution's right to privacy protects Goodell's medical records, but whether disclosure in civil discovery violates that right is decided through Pavesich's case-by-case balancing of the privacy interest against competing interests like the plaintiff's litigation need, not through federal-style strict scrutiny, and neither lower court performed that balancing.

The ruling sets the standard Georgia trial courts must use whenever a civil litigant claims a constitutional privacy right blocks discovery of sensitive records like medical files. It affects personal injury, STD-transmission, and similar lawsuits statewide, guiding judges on how to weigh privacy against a plaintiff's need for evidence without adopting an unworkable, discovery-freezing test.

Judgment vacated and case remanded

1. The court traced the Georgia constitutional right to privacy back to its 1905 decision in Pavesich v. New England Life Ins. Co., and explained that this right has been consistently recognized through multiple state constitutions, so it remains part of Paragraph I today and applies to personal medical records under later precedent.
2. Applying that unchallenged precedent, the court found Goodell has a genuine privacy interest in the decade of primary care and lab records Moulton sought, since Georgia law already extends the constitutional privacy right to medical information in analogous contexts.
3. The court then had to decide what legal test governs when civil discovery can override that privacy right, since no prior case had squarely addressed civil discovery of medical records; it looked to Pavesich itself, which called for a flexible, case-by-case balancing of the privacy interest against the rights and needs of others, rather than a rigid formula.
4. The court rejected strict scrutiny, the demanding constitutional test that requires a restriction to be the least restrictive way of serving a compelling need, because that test emerged decades after Pavesich, was inconsistently applied even in the court's own privacy cases, and would risk making almost all sensitive personal records off-limits to ordinary civil discovery.
5. Because neither the trial court (which focused only on whether Goodell waived his privacy right) nor the Court of Appeals of Georgia (which wrongly treated a hearing alone as enough to satisfy the substantive privacy right) actually performed the required balancing of Goodell's privacy interest against Moulton's litigation needs and the public's interest in open courts, the case must go back for that balancing to occur in the first instance.

• right to privacy
• medical records discovery
• STD transmission lawsuit
• Georgia Constitution
• protective orders