"[Redacted]": a Brief Tale of Troll Defense

I haven't shared on here any stories from back when I was in private practice, because candidly the folks on LinkedIn were never my target clientele ??

But something happened back on July 4th that several of my NCCU Law classmates have urged me to post here too, because 1?? it's funny and 2?? it's a cautionary tale on apparently-never-ending weird ?? that can happen to you as an attorney.

(Obligatory forewarning that there's a lot of backstory for a tiny summary. If you already know what "The Threadnought" is, you can safely jump to the end.)

First, three things as background:

1. Back in law school when I was gathering info about starting my own law firm, one of my professors suggested I pick three areas of the law to focus on, stacked like a pyramid: a steady-but-low-$$ base practice area to pay office expenses, a "fat middle" practice area to pay salaries, and then a niche specialty at the top where you want to be an expert so bad you'll do cases for free.
2. First Amendment law – both in the criminal realm defending protestors from the Government, and in the civil realm defending people from SLAPPs – was that "specialty" for me (I put "specialty" in quotes because the State Bar prohibits us from using that term if we are not Bar-certified specialists, which requires passing an exam first, except that exam does not exist for First Amendment law for whatever reason ??). I put an immense amount of time and energy into mastering the field, took cases pro bono, and litigated tf out of any case we took. In 10 years of practice, we only lost a handful of several hundred protest cases and never lost a single SLAPP defense.
3. I also talked about First Amendment law a lot on Twitter and Facebook, which... foreshadowing! ??

Totally unknown to me back in mid-2019, some random guy named Vic worked as a voice actor in Texas. I had no clue who he was, including that he apparently had a decades-long reputation in the community for being a sex pest toward women and prepubescent girls, assaulted two of his lady coworkers, and then sued those coworkers for defamation when both women came forward with details about their assaults.

So far as anyone could tell at the time, Vic's plan was never to actually win his lawsuit. It was to have his fans harass his victims, and harass anyone who defended those victims, until all of them went away – classic SLAPP behavior.

One of the ways you could tell the lawsuit was bumptious codswallop was in letters that Vic's lawyers sent to the defendants to comply with the Texas Defamation Mitigation Act, a state law that requires prospective plaintiffs to inform anticipated defendants of what statements were defamatory and why. Here are two of several examples from the TDMA letters of "defamatory" statements (these are both 100% real btw):

Then there was Vic's deposition itself, where he spontaneously demonstrated for the camera how he assaulted one of the defendants by yanking her hair:

It would take literal years for me to fully explain to you the sheer breadth of chicanery contained in the Vic Mignogna v Funimation et al LOLsuit. If you're a masochist who wants more details, the Texas 2nd Court of Appeals opinion has a legal summary and this write-up in The Verge has the backstory.

But for purposes of this note, just know that several people – harassed by Vic's fans as "Round 2" lawsuit targets – asked several First Amendment lawyers to weigh in.

One of them tagged me on Twitter for my opinion.

Which I dutifully provided... ??

I thought my response to the query was fairly anodyne given the TDMA letters: "Who is Vic? And why does he have a moron representing him on a bumptious defamation claim?"

I made that comment in a tweet at 12:33pm EDT on June 6th, 2019. By that night, Vic's lawyers – living proof that the bar exam is a test of minimum competence – went on a YouTube livestream to ask a doxxing website to choose me as their next target: "I'm asking the Farms for help. I'm asking them for help! Make these people miserable, please. I would consider it a personal favor."

Predictably I was doxxed a few minutes later. All of my social media accounts were flooded with gibberish, my phone number was dialed non-stop (shout-out to Apple for their "Silence Unknown Callers" feature!), and at one point I even got a hand-written death threat mailed to my apartment.

The back-and-forth on Twitter led to one of the longest threads in the app's history – dubbed "The Threadnought" by one commentator – that is (sadly) still going today. My pledge to let the thread die if Vic's fans would just stop @'ing me for 24 hours has been ignored for years now ??

The Threadnought is still going even after Vic's case got LOL'd out of court, losing 0-17 at the trial court in October 2019, 0-18 at the 2nd Court of Appeals (he lost a cross-appeal requesting even higher sanctions for filing a SLAPP), and 0-18 again at the Texas Supreme Court.

(This case is also how I ended up getting a law license in Texas btw.)

Alllllllll of that background info is just to say: when I left private practice to go in-house back in June 2022, I didn't want to deal with a bunch of rabid pedo apologists contacting the HR department at my new job trying to get me fired.

So first I waited a bit to update my LinkedIn profile at all.

Then a couple months in, when it became apparent I needed to update my profile so my coworkers wouldn't wonder why I hadn't yet, I listed my employer as [Redacted] instead of listing the company name.

That's "redacted" as in "censored or obscured for legal or security reasons."

It wasn't until I had been here for nearly a year that I finally changed my profile to list where I actually worked. Because I figured "surely no one is actually spending their time trying to get me fired still, right?" ??

So you can imagine my reaction on Independence Day, when I opened up Twitter to see this:

The same people who spent their waking hours harassing the victims of a well-documented sex pest for years have apparently also been monitoring my LinkedIn profile, saw [Redacted] – not linked to any actual company page mind you, as LinkedIn does when you're identifying an actual company! – and went searching for a company with that name so they could go ask for my termination ??

For young lawyers in the litigation game, be aware on the front end that this sort of clown ?? can happen to you. If you're already comfortable with it, great! But if not, take precautions ahead of time.

Either way, don't let it dissuade you from zealous representation for people who need it. Because frankly the only messages SLAPP bullies understand come from people they cannot intimidate into silence.

(Also lobby your Congressfolk for a federal anti-SLAPP statute, thx!)