Case: 12-57302, 05/18/2015, ID: 9540348, DktEntry: 197-1, Page 9 of 42
GARCIA V. GOOGLE
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performance, we conclude that the district court did not abuse
its discretion in denying Garcia’s request for the preliminary
injunction. As a consequence, the panel’s mandatory
injunction against Google was unjustified and is dissolved
upon publication of this opinion.
BACKGROUND AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
In July 2011, Cindy Lee Garcia responded to a casting
call for a film titled Desert Warrior, an action-adventure
thriller set in ancient Arabia. Garcia was cast in a cameo role,
for which she earned $500. She received and reviewed a few
pages of script. Acting under a professional director hired to
oversee production, Garcia spoke two sentences: “Is George
crazy? Our daughter is but a child?” Her role was to deliver
those lines and to “seem[] concerned.”
Garcia later discovered that writer-director Mark Basseley
Youssef (a.k.a. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula or Sam Bacile)
had a different film in mind: an anti-Islam polemic renamed
Innocence of Muslims. The film, featuring a crude
production, depicts the Prophet Mohammed as, among other
things, a murderer, pedophile, and homosexual. Film
producers dubbed over Garcia’s lines and replaced them with
a voice asking, “Is your Mohammed a child molester?”
Garcia appears on screen for only five seconds.
Almost a year after the casting call, in June 2012, Youssef
uploaded a 13-minute-and-51-second trailer of Innocence of
Muslims to YouTube, the video-sharing website owned by
Google, Inc., which boasts a global audience of more than
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