A federal judge has ordered Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to pay $15,000 to the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, found that his sworn testimony was not credible, and directed him to stop posting about the hotel and its lawyers on social media, a sweeping set of rebukes that have left the celebrity rabbi in an increasingly precarious position as the case heads toward trial.
The sanctions order, issued by Magistrate Judge Marty Fulgueira Elfenbein on Feb. 27, found that Boteach knowingly violated a court-ordered protective order by posting confidential hotel surveillance footage to his public Instagram account, where he has more than 90,000 followers, according to people familiar with the matter. The sanction covers the hotel’s attorney’s fees incurred in bringing the motion.
The directive to stop posting came separately, in a Feb. 20 order by U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore, who is presiding over the case. Judge Moore wrote that he was “deeply disturbed” by Boteach’s conduct and ordered him to “cease such harassing conduct and social media references to Plaintiff and its counsel during the course of this litigation.” The order came after the hotel described what it called an “extensive online harassment campaign” consisting of what it characterized as “unhinged and scurrilous rants about this case and Plaintiff and Plaintiff’s counsel.”
The social media ban is a significant development for Boteach, who has made his public campaign against the Fontainebleau a central feature of his online presence since the underlying dispute began. Boteach, who bills himself as “America’s Rabbi” and has more than a million followers across platforms, has posted relentlessly about the case, accusing the hotel and its owner, Jeffrey Soffer, of antisemitism and calling on his followers to boycott the property.
The Fontainebleau sued Boteach in December 2024, alleging defamation, extortion and tortious interference with business relationships. The lawsuit stems from a late-night altercation on Dec. 1, 2024, in the hotel lobby, when another guest, Faiz Akbar, directed antisemitic slurs at Boteach. The two sides sharply disagree about what happened next. The hotel says its security team de-escalated the situation and barred Akbar from the property. Boteach says the staff sided with his attacker and that the hotel refused to cooperate with law enforcement. Within hours, Boteach began posting edited video of the encounter on Instagram and, according to the hotel’s complaint, launched a weeks-long campaign of false accusations against the hotel, its ownership and its staff, including AI-generated videos purporting to show hotel employees celebrating antisemitism.
In September 2025, Judge Moore denied Boteach’s motion to dismiss the hotel’s defamation claims, finding that his statement that he was banned from the hotel for being “too Jewish” was capable of being proven false and therefore actionable. The hotel maintains Boteach was removed under a standard policy applied to guests who threaten litigation against the property.
The sanctions dispute centers on what happened after Boteach obtained surveillance footage of the incident from the Miami Beach Police Department through a subpoena. Before any protective order was in place, Boteach posted an excerpt of the footage to Instagram in April 2025. The parties then jointly agreed to a protective order, which the court entered on April 9, 2025. One day later, Boteach posted the footage again. When the hotel formally designated the footage “Highly Confidential” under the protective order, Boteach removed the posts and publicly acknowledged on Twitter that he was “required under the rules to remove the video.” Five months later, in September 2025, he posted it again.
Boteach argued that the September reposting was inadvertent. He said he had recently undergone back surgery, was taking prescribed opioid pain medication at the maximum dosage and had mistakenly believed the footage was no longer subject to confidentiality restrictions because it was going to be used as a deposition exhibit. The court was not persuaded. His explanation “is not credible given his own prior written acknowledgment of his obligations,” the judge wrote. The court declined to impose the most severe sanctions the hotel sought, including exclusion of the footage at trial and the striking of Boteach’s pleadings. The court did warn that any future violation would be treated with “the utmost seriousness” and that dismissal and default judgment were among the remedies the court would consider.
The Feb. 20 order that imposed the social media ban also denied Boteach’s requests to reopen discovery and extend deadlines for serving two third-party defendants, Soffer and Akbar. Judge Moore found that Boteach had “not acted diligently to conduct discovery” on his counterclaims and had “not demonstrated good cause” for the extensions. The court noted that Magistrate Judge Elfenbein had “repeatedly cautioned” Boteach to begin pursuing discovery on his counterclaims, to no avail. The court also ordered Boteach to show cause why his third-party claims should not be dismissed for failure to prosecute.
The Feb. 10 order had already flagged the same pattern. In that ruling, Judge Moore noted that Boteach had canceled a scheduled in-person deposition in Miami, citing back problems, while posting videos of himself ice skating, kayaking and bicycling on social media. The court warned that sanctions, potentially including the striking of his pleadings, would follow if the conduct continued.
Boteach has filed counterclaims against the hotel alleging violations of the Civil Rights Act and tortious interference with business relationships, arguing that hotel security failed to protect him during what he describes as an antisemitic attack and later retaliated against him by revoking his access to the property. His attorneys, from Offit Kurman, argued in a January filing that the hotel’s separate motion for Rule 11 sanctions was an “extraordinary overreach” and that his civil-rights counterclaims were grounded in established law.
I've never seen or heard anything about Soffer that could remotely be construed as antisemitic. He's not a self loather and Miami Beach has an enormous Jewish population and is still home to a substantial Orthodox community.
Rabbi Boteach is capable of being quite obnoxious. I hope he's wrong about Soffer.