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The Utah Court of Appeals has reversed a district judge's decision that denied The Salt Lake Tribune's request to intervene in a lawsuit to open records that had been sealed.

The appeals court said 3rd District Judge L.A. Dever had failed to make a record of the reasons he denied the motion to intervene in the case in which Nu Skin co-founder Sandra Tillotson had sued a former husband claiming he had defamed her in chapters of a proposed tell-all book that appeared on his website. The May 2012 lawsuit alleged the proposed book and the ex-husband's actions had caused her to lose her board seat and the company's stock price to decline.

Dever had sealed the entire record at the request of Tillotson's attorneys. The Tribune's attorney, Ed Carter, sought to intervene, arguing that Dever had failed to follow established judicial procedures.

The appeals court said it couldn't make a decision on the merits of The Tribune's arguments because Dever had denied its motion to intervene without specifically stating the reasons for the decision. It sent the case back to District Court for further consideration.

"Based on the record before us, we cannot conduct meaningful review of the District Court's decision on the intervention motion," the justices said.

Dever retired from the bench in November and Judge Barry Lawrence has been assigned to the case.

In a decision in an earlier case, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that a lower court had improperly sealed records because judges had failed to take the specific steps spelled out in the Utah Code of Judicial Administration. Those require a judge to:

• Make findings specific to each document in order to justify sealing them

• Identify and balance public and private interests

• Determine if there are "reasonable alternatives" to sealing

Those steps must be made even when both sides of a lawsuit agree to seal the record, the high court held.

"Because here the facts in the record do not show that the public interest was considered or that alternatives to closing the record were considered, the district court abused its discretion when it granted the sealing order, and the order must be set aside," the Supreme Court said.