A Connecticut lawyer’s claim that Sig Sauer defamed him in a Facebook post that called lawyers who have litigated claims the company’s P320 handgun can discharge without a trigger pull “grifters” can go ahead, according to a recent ruling from a federal judge. The United States District Court for the District of Connecticut recently denied a motion from Sig Sauer to dismiss Jeffrey S. Bagnell’s defamation suit.

Bagnell is arguing that a March 7, 2025, post Sig Sauer put on its website and Facebook and Instagram pages that attributed lawsuits alleging a design flaw in the P320, one of the company’s most popular handgun models, allowed it to be fired without the trigger being pulled to an anti-gun agenda.

“Recently, anti-gun groups, members of the mainstream media, trial attorneys, and other uninformed and agenda-driven parties have launched attacks on one of SIG SAUER’s most trusted, most tested and most popular products – the P320 pistol. In all cases, these individuals have an ulterior motive behind their baseless allegations that the P320 can fire without a trigger pull; they have no evidence, no data and no empirical testing to support any of their claims. They instead choose to misrepresent clear, negligent discharges as a ‘design problem.'” the company wrote in the March 2025 post.

“The rhetoric is high, and we can no longer stay silent while lawsuits run their course, and clickbait farming, engagement hacking grifters continue their campaign to hijack the truth for profit.” the post continued.

Bagnell’s lawsuit argues that he is “reasonably understood by the public to be one of the attorneys, if not the primary attorney, referenced in the post” because of his history of litigating cases against Sig Sauer. According to the complaint in the lawsuit, Bagnell has been involved in bringing cases against Sig Sauer involving the P320 since 2017 and was the first attorney in the country to bring the company to trial for an alleged defective discharge of a P320, dating back to 2018.

The lawsuit further claims that, while Sig Sauer was aware of the defect in the P320 due to the history of litigation, it posted a false statement in March 2025 with the intent to “discredit, shame, and intimidate” Bagnell and other attorneys suing the company “and harm their practices.”

According to the complaint, Bagnell served the company with a written demand to correct or retract the post, which he claims is defamatory, which Sig Sauer did not comply with.

“Defendant’s refusal to retract, despite receiving formal demand, constitutes additional evidence of actual malice, willful intent, and a deliberate strategy to suppress criticism and mislead the public.” the complaint states.

Bagnell’s lawsuit charges Sig Sauer with violating Connecticut’s statute against libel per se and violating the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA).

Connecticut statute puts the burden of proof of proving actual malice, or malice in fact, on the defendant and has a mechanism to first require a victim of alleged defamation to demand a public retraction, which Bagnell says he complied with. Under the statute, for awarding libel damages in a civil suit, “the defendant may give proof of intention; and unless the plaintiff proves either malice in fact or that the defendant, after having been requested by the plaintiff in writing to retract the libelous charge, in as public a manner as that in which it was made, failed to do so within a reasonable time, the plaintiff shall recover nothing but such actual damage as the plaintiff may have specially alleged and proved.”

The complaint alleges that Sig Sauer’s March post falsely accuses him of “dishonesty, lack of professional integrity, and unethical conduct,” and that the post’s statements were made with “actual malice, knowledge of falsity, or reckless disregard for the truth,” meeting Connecticut law’s definition of libel per se.

Additionally, the complaint charges Sig Sauer with violating CUTPA, Connecticut’s law against unfair trade practices. Under the law, anyone whose business is damaged by an unfair act, can bring legal action to recover their loss. Bagnell’s lawsuit alleges that Sig Sauer’s claim that the litigation involving the P320 was baseless was a “deceptive act intended to mislead the public, potential jurors, and deter future claims,” to the detriment of his business. It also claims that Sig Sauer’s failure to issue a retraction demonstrates an “unethical, immoral, and unscrupulous business practice.”

Sig Sauer sought to have the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that Bagnell had not stated libel claims and that the post at issue are non-actionable because they contain the company’s opinions and cannot be defamatory.

“The statements from the P320 Post about which Bagnell complains, read in the context of the P320 Post as a whole, reflect SIG’s opinions – passionately held and strongly expressed – as to the merits of a wide range of commentary, accusations, and attacks lobbed at SIG’s P320 from a variety of sources.” the motion to dismiss states.

It also argues that the post nowhere identifies Bagnell or any other attorney or group by name, which cannot meet the standard of defamation, which requires a defamatory statement to be identifiable to a third party.

“It is improper for a plaintiff to take generalized language and pick out isolated phrases, then recast them as a direct attack on an individual’s ethics or professional integrity when the publication itself does not expressly make such an accusation. Permitting a plaintiff to manufacture an actionable defamatory statement through subjective recharacterization would invert the governing standard and chill protected speech.” the motion to dismiss continues.

But Judge Victor Bolden, nominated by then-President Obama in 2014, did not agree, denying the motion to dismiss. Bolden agreed with Bagnell’s argument that the statements contained in the post were not an opinion because of context, language used, and Sig Sauer’s classification of their statements as objective facts that could be verified, and over which they had superior knowledge. Bolden found that even if Sig Sauer’s statements were opinions, they might still be actionable because they implied “there are undisclosed defamatory facts which justify the opinion.”

Bolden also denied the request to dismiss the CUTPA claim.

This is not the first time Bagnell and Sig Sauer have been involved in a civil suit. In 2022, Sig Sauer sought a preliminary injunction against Bagnell’s use of a video animation of the P320, allegedly showing the defect allowing it to fire without a trigger pull, which the company alleged made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” and misrepresented and visually distorted the pistol’s components.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire (ACLU of NH) filed an amicus brief in the suit on Bagnell’s behalf, alleging Sig Sauer’s injunction amounted to “impermissible prior restraint on speech addressing matters of public concern.” Sig Sauer is headquartered in New Hampshire.

The ACLU of NH argued that the injunction, which sought to prevent the animation from being published on any medium, would obstruct the public’s “compelling interest in timely access to information” on the topic of whether there was an alleged defect in a mass-produced firearm.

The case was later transferred to the Connecticut district court, where Bolden ruled against Bagnell and ordered him to permanently refrain from using the animation.

According to Sig Sauer’s motion to dismiss Bagnell’s defamation suit involving the March 2025, Bagnell also attempted to sue the company for defamation in 2022 over a March 2022 press release referencing the injunction, but in that case Bagnell was unsuccessful in convincing the court he had grounds for relief.

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