Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/looks-like-shit.html
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Holy Guacamole! That makes my skin crawl, what a scumbag.
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Donated.
Thank you for sharing the Go Fund Me link.
They’re less than two thirds of the way to their goal, so every donation still matters very much.
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“technically it’s ephobilia” is an interesting approach to a libel case when you’re accused of raping teens.
and by interesting i mean incredibly shitty.
are any lawyer bbers able to chime in, i thought truth was an absolute defense against libel. (ex: as much as rob might want to for example, he can’t s.l.a.p.p. me for saying he’s a ginger because it’s accurate.)
i’m confused how a court case could go on long enough to have significant fees if the statemnt was provably true unless the judge was also a /r/protectandserve moderator
(and yes I know I mispelled but autocorrect doesn’t tell me how to spell properly and I’d rather not search for to get the correct spelling. autocorrect thinks i mean xenophobia and yeah the two are strange bedfellows but not the same word firefox)
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I wonder what would happen if 10 different people sued this guy for 10 different things that he did not do?
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A court case doesn’t have to go on all that long to get $140k in legal fees. Also, unless you can get it dismissed with prejudice they’ll appeal and continue to drain your funds.
What seems strange is how a guy on a former cop’s salary can afford to prosecute the case for so long, especially one with such long odds of winning.
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He put up a Go Fund Me aimed at the Thin Blue Line crowd?
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A friend of mine is in the process of going broke because a crazy guy who saw her on Shark Tank (she was unsuccessful) claims he had the idea first. Never met her or had any contact with her and has no evidence of that claim - but apparently has deep enough pockets and a shady enough lawyer that he just keeps filing suit after suit. His latest gambit - after losing twice already is to file for a ten million dollar disparagement suit because she called him crazy on her Facebook page.
Our legal system is broken.
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Something similar: This is why (as a previous renter) I love the MA state law where if a landlord tries to dip into your security deposit for “normal wear and tear”, all you have to do is file a court complaint, then you can get triple the entire deposit back.
If you have a $2k deposit and they try to say “well, you can see there’s a nail hole in the wall” or “we had to hire cleaners”…that’s a free $4k.
Almost had to invoke this after living in a place for 9 years, taking good care of it, rent bumped up every year, and the landlord turned all nasty when we told him we were moving out to buy a place. I reminded him that my wife used to do property management, and we got the check in full a few days later 
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Unless Iowa procedure is different from other states’, the plaintiff doesn’t even appeal.
If you don’t get the complaint dismissed with prejudice, the plaintiff just files an amended complaint. And then a second amended complaint. And then a third amended complaint. Each time, the defendant is on the hook for whatever it costs to prepare a motion to dismiss (which, depending on the complaint and the hourly rate of the lawyer producing it, can be a pretty expensive document to produce), and each time the task gets a little harder as the plaintiff (presumably) fixes the problems with the complaint that made it easy to dismiss the first time.
Not sure whether that happened here, though the insurance-plus-$140,000 price tag makes me think they went around and around on at least a couple of versions of the complaint and maybe even proceeded to summary judgment.
EDIT: Found the docket. The paper answered instead of moving to dismiss–that is, the paper filed a responsive pleading that admitted or denied the facts alleged in the complaint, instead of filing a motion arguing that the complaint was legally deficient–and then litigated the case through discovery (which is itself a potentially expensive process) and to summary judgment. The whole thing took about ten months (which seems to me remarkably quick, but may not be for an Iowa state court proceeding). But that bill sounds about right, unfortunately, for that much work.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers often take even long-shot cases on contingency for a cut of the winnings. The attorney who represented the ex-officer in this case is a solo practitioner whose first listed practice area on his website is “personal injury.” Dollars-to-donuts this was a contingency case.
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Sounds like you made the mistake of reminding him of your wife’s previous profession. The extra could’ve gone into your deposit for the new place.
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Yeah, but being legally in the right doesn’t stop people from suing you in the first place. The whole reason anti-SLAPP laws exist is because you can easily bankrupt someone even if they’re able to successfully defend against the lawsuit, just because of the cost of mounting a defense.
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IANAL
Would moving to dismiss with prejudice have served the paper better? Or was it not legally feasible?
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I’m curious- what would actually happen if you had a frivolous lawsuit submitted against you, but you literally could not even afford a lawyer or any sort of court costs? Do you just automatically lose because this is 'Merica?
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I’m curious about that too.
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Technically no you don’t automatically lose. You have the option to represent yourself, which will generally result in losing further down the line. That’s why a lot of states have instituted a set of laws, called SLAPP laws, that create a mechanism for dissuading frivolous suits, usually by providing some type of multiple of costs penalty for suits found to be in violation. Lots of lawyers are willing to represent someone in such a situation for a but of that penalty. Iowa is not one of those states.
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We need to make it way easier to disbar lawyers. For this kind of case it could be “lose two defamation cases that you brought, and you can’t practice law anymore.”
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Phew, looks like based on this map, my state is covered by SLAPP.
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I can’t tell just from the docket–but my guess is that the plaintiff didn’t plead all the awful things he did in his complaint. On a motion to dismiss, the court treats all the allegations in the complaint as true and decides whether, if all those allegations are true, the plaintiff has nevertheless failed to make a legally cognizable claim. So my guess is that because here all the action was presumably on an affirmative defense of truth, there was probably fact development necessary to demonstrate that what the paper wrote was true.
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That should be pretty easy, considering how few lawyers sit in our nation’s legislatures and how little money bar associations contribute to political campaigns.
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