Jan. 18—The state Commission of Public Records and the Records Center and Archives have agreed to pay $22,500 to settle a lawsuit filed by a Santa Fe man who accused the New Mexico state historian of violating his free speech rights by deleting critical comments from the historian’s Facebook page.

Plaintiff Daniel Ortiz hailed the settlement.

“Public officials should be held accountable for their actions and should not hide viewpoints they do not agree with,” he wrote in an email.

State Historian Rob Martinez — who previously wrote a monthly history column for The New Mexican — said in a phone interview Thursday the Facebook page in question was his own personal page and not an official page.

Martinez said he’d been dismissed as a defendant in case in September and was not a party to the settlement.

Whether the page appeared to be or was run as an official page had been at issue in the case.

The 2022 lawsuit accused Martinez of deleting Ortiz’s comments written under a link on a Facebook page to a column Martinez wrote about the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors and how institutions developed in that process were brought to the New World.

The settlement, agreed to in September, is the third case in which Ortiz’s attorney Kenneth Stalter has secured an out-of-court settlement for a plaintiff who accused a public official of violating free speech rights by deleting critical comments from a Facebook page.

The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office agreed last year to pay $32,500 to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed the law enforcement agency violated her right to free speech by deleting her posts on the agency’s Facebook page and blocking her from accessing or posting comments on the page.

The First Judicial District Attorney’s Office agreed in 2022 to a $25,000 settlement in a case filed by Santa Fe businessman Aaron Borrego, who claimed District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies discriminated against him based on his viewpoint when she deleted a critical comment he posted on her official page and blocked him from making more comments.