#SLAPP Suit

[queersatanic]

The Satanic Temple, Inc. v. Newsweek Magazine LLC (1:22-cv-01343) in the Southern District of New York

The Satanic Temple sued Newsweek in federal court for writing an article about TST hitting four former members in Washington State (hi!) with a SLAPP suit. TST lost 21 of 22 claims; what remains is TST claiming to be a private figure and TST claiming they have no history of sexual harassment and abuse being covered up within the org.

If you or someone you know has personal experiences relating to this, please share.

[originalleftist]

Almost two years now, and there still hasn't been anything like the reckoning for that that there should have been- or any assurances the mob won't just jump on the next popular bandwagon and do it again.

Remember when exactly one year ago today the world celebrated a bisexual woman being harassed by her abuser, and applauded him for successfully using the court system to further humiliate and hurt her. Remember when they showed his homophobic/transphobic texts in court—which he used as justification for his DV—and the jury decided that it didn’t really count. Remember when people waited outside the court house to hug and congratulate him for successfully getting away with it. On the first day of pride month.

[socialjusticefail]

This article is throwing shade at Musk for filing an obvious SLAPP suit. The article writer also throws in some complaints about ADL while saying ADL has the free speech right to convince advertisers to not buy ads on exTwitter.

[ohmysatan42]

Not me flirting with a guy by sending him john oliver youtube videos.

[immaculatasknight]

Lawyers put in their place

[iinfosurge]

Lies, and money, and a history of (no) violence! Oh my!

Believe all women? Please don’t. Especially not a woman by the name of Jo Natauri.

If the recent verdict in the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard case taught us anything, it’s this: Women are just as likely as men to lie, manipulate, and mislead. If anything, some of them are more likely to. After all, for years now, we have been encouraged, loudly and repeatedly, to believe all women, even the ones lacking a shred of evidence. As we saw in that Virginia courtroom, the jury determined that some women exploited this.

The following story plays out as Amber Heard, ironically, warned in her Washington Post op-ed against abuse where, drawing an analogy to the Titanic, people will “patch holes” to protect a powerful man accused of abuse – not because they care about him – but because they have a vested interest in his enterprise staying afloat. What happens if the woman is the powerful enterprise? This reality, a brutal one, is full of false allegations, cover-ups, unconscionable lies, and more than a few uncomfortable truths. It involves attempts by powerful people to destroy a good man’s name to keep Jo Natauri afloat.

The man’s name is Tiku Natauri.

Before going any further, it’s important to make the following clear: Everything you read here is backed up by facts – in other words, actual evidence. Before writing this piece, my investigation reviewed a number of illuminating email and text exchanges, documents, video footage, and audio recordings (including the police recordings embedded below). Now, you may find yourself asking the following: Why am I reading the story here, on Substack, and not somewhere more, shall we say, prestigious? Good question. Well, the answer is quite simple.

The editors I reached out to were terrified by the idea of being hit with SLAPP suits. For the uninitiated, these suits are intended to intimidate and silence critics. They are frighteningly effective. This is America, after all, a place where slapping someone with a lawsuit has become a national hobby, a recreational activity, just something people do to pass the time. Americans sue for fun. This is why you’re reading the story here (thank you, by the way). It’s not because other outlets didn’t want to run the story. They did. However, the costs involved – or more specifically, the perceived costs – of being sued by someone, who has already spent millions on attorneys, gave outlets the chills.

The final question many will ask is this: Why are you writing it, and why should I read it? Like the Amber Heard affair, this is a public interest story: The number of articles referencing #MeToo and #BelieveWomen have exploded in recent weeks, and here seems to be another prominent #MeToo ambassador falsely alleging domestic violence.

Journalism that actually serves the interests of the public is at a premium. It’s also under threat. This story matters to anyone in possession of a conscience.

[auressea]

@allthecanadianpolitics did you see this yet?

Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower

Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:

https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/23/01/2023BCCA0160.htm

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

Keep reading

[gwydionmisha]

Elon Musk's Thermonuclear Defamation Suit Is a Dud

[alephskoteinos]

Honestly, the fact that SLAPP suits are a thing in the USA at all is just utterly absurd. Why, in a country where you can ostensibly say whatever you want, people can sue you into silence for saying things they don't like?

[probablyasocialecologist]

The rise of the MAGA right in the United States has sparked some startling changes in attitudes towards press freedom and freedom of expression. Although many on the right, including Musk, have styled themselves as valiant defenders of free speech, their actions expose them as opposite: only willing to defend speech they find agreeable, while hostile towards and desperate to clamp down on criticism or opposing views. Musk, for example, has directed that “cisgender” be blocklisted on Twitter as a “slur”, and posts by most accounts that contain the word are automatically hidden from view (unlike posts containing the long list of slurs he has apparently deemed acceptable). He has brought SLAPP lawsuits against critics, including one dismissed by a federal judge as clearly intended to “punish [the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate] for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. [Twitter] — and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism.” He spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, ostensibly over concerns that conservative voices were being unfairly silenced, but really so that he could be the one to dictate which speech was and was not allowed on the platform. Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters. This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

2 January 2025

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Parker Molloy at The Present Age:

This week, we watched as the world's richest man appeared to give a Nazi salute at Trump's post-inauguration rally. Twice. Then we watched as mainstream media outlets bent over backwards to avoid saying what we all saw. The New York Times went with "Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture." The Washington Post opted for "Elon Musk gives exuberant speech at inauguration." Some local TV stations, as Marisa Kabas noted at The Handbasket, even cut their footage right before the first and most obvious salute. Meanwhile, as Tim Dickinson reported at Rolling Stone, neo-Nazis and white nationalists weren't shy about what they saw. Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus shared the clip with SS lightning bolts, writing "I don't care if this was a mistake. I'm going to enjoy the tears over it." The Proud Boys Ohio chapter posted it with "Hail Trump!" White Lives Matter celebrated with references to "The White Flame." So why are mainstream outlets so reluctant to state the obvious? The answer lies in our broken defamation laws and the way wealthy individuals can weaponize them against critics. This is a legitimate free speech crisis.

NBC News reporter Kat Tenbarge explained on Bluesky: "It's difficult to overstate just how much professional journalists have been trained to fear defamation lawsuits and how much it has impacted the ability to tell the truth." She's right. And there's recent precedent for this fear when it comes to Musk specifically. Remember what happened to Media Matters? As Andy Craig points out, they "simply shared screenshots of major corporate ads running next to literally Hitler stuff and he sued them into mass layoffs and got two states to open criminal investigations of them." The chilling effect was immediate. Craig notes that coverage of similar issues "kind of petered out" afterward—"not because it got any harder to find examples to report." This is what journalist Mike Masnick calls a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit. These suits aren't necessarily meant to win in court; they're meant to silence critics through the sheer cost and hassle of defending against them. That's why Masnick and others have been "calling for anti-SLAPP laws (both federal and state) for years and years."

Mainstream media publications and even the ADL are beating the bush by avoiding calling out Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes, all because they are afraid of being sued. White supremacists and Neo-Nazis saw the salute for what it was: a validation of their wicked viewpoints.

See Also:

The Advocate: Journalist calls out people for being 'fine' with Elon Musk's Nazi salute but not pronouns

[queersatanic]

It looks like from TST's perspective in terms of their claims surviving, we have:

Jurisdiction ❌

(So Julia Duin is out of this case as an individual

Then for Merits:

Public figure ✅

(Newsweek did not disprove TST’s claim of being a private figure.)

Under Defamation

Financial Fraud❌

Sexual Misconduct (Deviancy)❌

Sexual Abuse✅

Misrepresenting Legal proceeding❌

Fraudulent Lawsuit❌

Defrauding the Public❌

Harassing Dissenters❌

Other “Terrible” Acts❌

And here a "checkmark" just means TST's claim that the court has been treating as true gets to survive a little longer. We have not gotten to the point where the court starts to look at what happens if the Temple's claims are not to be assumed true.

We also did our own breakdown of the ruling in this thread, which is mostly just taking each piece in more detail.

[philsmeatylegss]

That and he’s really pissing off Logan Paul to the point where he’s getting sued

Love coffezilla so much. I understand not a word that man says, even though he breaks it down to bare bones, I have no concept of finance. I still listen to that man talk every video. Im rooting for him despite not really knowing what I’m rooting for

[socialjusticefail]

This talks about all of the examples where rich people decided to sue to shut people up. It also argues that a federal anti-SLAPP.

[sophieinwonderland]

Speaking of being a wrecking ball and making enemies, I have so many asks piling up that I need to respond to...

But instead I feel like trolling a vindictive thin-skinned manchild with vast amounts of wealth he uses to bully and intimidate anyone who criticizes him by launching SLAPP suits against them.

I'm sure this will end fine. 🤷‍♀️

[beardedmrbean]

A New York judge tossed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News host Jessica Tarlov by Tony Bobulinski, while also ordering the GOP’s Biden impeachment witness to pay Tarlov’s legal fees, Mediaite reported.

The comment in question occurred during a March 20 episode of The Five, in which Tarlov, the show’s resident liberal co-host, said, “Tony Bobulinski’s lawyers' fees have been paid by a Trump Super PAC. That’s as recent as January.”

After receiving a notice from Bobulinski’s attorney threatening legal action, Tarlov cleared things up the next day.

“I would like to clarify a comment I made yesterday during our discussion of Tony Bobulinski’s appearance at the congressional hearing. During an exchange with my colleagues about the hearing, I said that Mr. Bobulinski’s lawyers’ fees have been paid by a Trump super PAC as recent as January,” Tarlov said.

“What was actually said during the hearing was that the law firm representing Mr. Bobulinski was paid by a Trump PAC. I have seen no indication those payments were made in connection with Mr. Bobulinski’s legal fees and he denies that they were.”

Yet that statement, according to Bobulinski’s lawyer, was insufficient, as he followed up with another request for a “complete retraction and apology.”

Fox replied by saying that Tarlov’s correction was “accurate,” and that they wouldn’t be making another.

Bobulinski then sued Tarlov for $30 million. In dismissing the case, Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote that Bobulinski didn’t show that Tarlov’s initial comment had damaged his reputation as a businessman.

“The New York Court of Appeals has held that, for a statement to qualify as defamation per se under the professional conduct exception, the statement must specifically reference conduct that is incompatible with a person’s profession, ‘rather than a more general reflection upon the plaintiff’s character or qualities,‘” he wrote.

Noting that New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which is designed to prevent frivolous lawsuits that chill free speech, applies, Oetken approved Tarlov’s request for her attorneys' fees to be paid for by Bobulinski.

Bobulinski, who pushed unproven claims during House Republicans' fruitless impeachment effort of President Joe Biden, is a former business associate of the Biden family.