Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/12/doing-pr-wrong.html
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Might wanna do something about that title; it’s awkward and unclear.
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What could possibly go wrong?
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Cory will donate a nickel to charity if you make a legally binding admission that you understand what he meant.
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Nevada has an anti-SLAPP law. I wonder if there is an application here?
“A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP suit, is a meritless lawsuit against someone for exercising his or her First Amendment rights. The objective of these suits is not to win, but to silence or make examples of critics by imposing large legal bills upon them.”
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Roger That!
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How would this be anti-SLAPP? SLAPP is about quickly getting rid of unsound lawsuits, not about service.
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I was referring more to the lawsuits behind the service.
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In a continuing demonstration of how journalists often get legal news wrong, it’s worth pointing out that Mandalay Bay is not “suing” anyone in the sense that you think they are.
Mandalay Bay is not suing the victims for money damages. What they’re doing is asking a court to declare that it is shielded from liability by a post-9/11 federal law called the SAFETY Act, which limits the liability of entities that engage in certain anti-terrorism security measures.
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Well, I gotta say … that’s some creative lawyering.
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How would Mandalay Bay know who was a survivor vs. someone who was nowhere near the city of Las Vegas?
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I feel weirdly sympathetic to Mandalay Bay, as well as everyone else involved. It’s obviously not reasonable for anyone to sue the hotel - there wasn’t anything they could do to have prevented this - and they’re just trying to head off a hugely expensive lawsuit from a bunch of desperate gun-shot victims who are living in a fucked-up country where the accepted remedy to prevent being financially destroyed by injury is to sue whoever is remotely connected and has insurance/funds to cover care. Which, given the scale of the event, can only be the hotel.
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I understand that is their justification. It is still a lawsuit, against which one might reasonably need to obtain expensive legal representation if their interests are to be considered in court.
When one files a SLAPP lawsuit, it is done with no real expectation of obtaining money damages, although they might be specified in the suit. It is a tactic to force the victim to pay for representation, and to intimidate them.
Once again, I am no a lawyer, so if my interpretation is wrong, let me know. But the SAFETY Act is specific to attacks that have been determined to be acts of terrorism by the Secretary of Homeland Security. That has not happened, and it seems unlikely to.
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True.
Well, calling it a “SLAPP lawsuit” is begging the question because it’s only a SLAPP lawsuit once a court says it is. The defendant has to bring an anti-SLAPP motion to get the court to dismiss the lawsuit. But yes, it requires the defendant to spend money on legal counsel. Otherwise, I would disagree that a lawsuit for declaratory relief and a SLAPP lawsuit are similar; the former isn’t an attempt to intimidate but rather a well-recognized way to sort out the parties’ rights. The latter, once designated as a SLAPP lawsuit, is effectively the court saying the lawsuit was bogus from the beginning.
You’re right, and this appears to be a problem fro MGM.
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They could just invite everybody back to the plaza and bust another window of the hotel, and hire a single process server to shoot the papers from a t-shirt cannon. /s
Same level of empathy in my view…
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Something something Barbra Streisand Las Vegas Residency.
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Mandalay Bay should do the correct thing, cover all the costs of all the victims and then take those lawyers and sue the crap out of the NRA and the gun manufacturers.
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Hmmm. Did you actually watch any of the compilations of security camera footage of him bringing bag after bag, case after case, into his room over the course of days?
Like, they have the cameras for some reason, one imagines, right? This kinda seems like one of those situations.
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$500 is that all you’ve got?
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