Why does it always come down to lashing out to do harm to others? It’s another lawsuit by a man who lost prestige over his acts of sexual harassment, now thinking he can recover his dignity by punishing someone else. It won’t work. He won’t win, and even if he did, it’s not going to make him more employable.
That whole thing just makes David Silverman look pathetic and crushed.
I’m kind of happy that my name isn’t on the list of defendants.
Silverman is his own lawyer, eh?
Might have a case.
“No longer able to get a job in any position of authority.”
If he really cared he’d do the work he could like the other rubes.
Good grief, the illiteracy, it burns! I’d agree with Siggy @ #1 that he must be acting as his own lawyer, but that seems to be the quality of many of the lawyers this country is graduating now, so I’m not sure. I had always envisioned court filings and documents would be written with every i dotted and every t crossed, in the most precise, direct and professional language, but man, have I ever been disabused of that fiction over the last few months.
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I’ve been following the anti-defamation suit of Vic Mignogna (who was mentioned here a couple of months ago) and “It’s another lawsuit by a man who lost prestige over his acts of sexual harassment, now thinking he can recover his dignity by punishing someone else. It won’t work. He won’t win, and even if he did, it’s not going to make him more employable,” describes his case to a T.
But his lawyers are so blazingly, dumbfoundingly incompetent that it’s attracted the attention of Law Twitter (not exactly sure if that’s a thing, or just a ton of lawyers following the case for laughs that got dubbed that, like the “Threadnought” hashtag given to the Twitter summary), and their filings read a great deal like Silverman’s here, only moreso.
I won’t bore those uninterested in the case with the most bizarre details, but if the schadenfreude of watching Gamergate-adjacent lawyers and their sex-pest clients implode in court is your thing, settle in. It’s quite a ride. Going by the filing above, Silverman’s case looks like it will be a pale imitation but with the same outcome.
@Ridana, #4:
Yes, and this is the amended complaint (ie: with the opportunity for corrections). I’m guessing that the amendment is the rather fetching dark blue sharpie ink striking out one of the original defendants. Anyone know who that might have been?
I note that NJ does not have a SLAPP protection law.
Good grief! Even if he’s pro se on this, how did someone rise to the head of AA with this poor a grasp of the English language?
It’s obvious that he resides in Seattle, Washington, but he’s using standard New Jersey forms – so we’re left wondering if there’s a city called Seattle in New Jersey. He even encountered this when he initially listed his home county where he should have listed the county he was filing in, he corrected that (or the court clerk did, it’s actually XXXed out, which is charmingly anachronistic. Law Courts are about the only place you can still find a typewriter in use these days), but didn’t bother to add his state of residence to the appropriate line on the form.
Then we get to his statement of claims – note the rookie’s use of the term ‘conspired’. Is it really likely that AA senior staff, Buzzfeed et al got together to ‘defraud [him] of [his] right to defend himself’? Does such a right even exist? A lawyer, or any other minimally competent person would at this point explain what that right was and from what laws it is obtained.
Finally, the abrupt swing from the first person ‘Inability to work in my profession…’, to the third ‘… halted his hirability …’ within a single paragraph is abrupt and amateurish. This would be a failing grade in a high-school english paper. Also – can you halt someone’s hirability? Is it on the move?
This thing is sad. It makes me feel like it was composed in a depressing, stained, room in a weekly-rental motel. Likely with a bottle of whisky to hand and plenty of self-pity to follow. This is a first-draft, at best. Something that you might angrily type out at 3am on a sleepless night. Something you read in the morning and either delete or re-write. That he not only filed the thing, but actually amended it and kept the suit going is a testament to how low an intellect can sink.
snarkhuntr, interesting take. Motivated reasoning, but, IMO.
Me, I too think it’s bullshit, but it’s at least cogent and reasonably unambiguous.
(I grant the switch between first and third person is amusing and suggestive)
The writing as such isn’t that terrible, but the tone is unhinged. It sounds like someone with no experience writing a complaint trying to sound like someone who knows how. He’d have been better off just using his own voice.
PaulBC –
It reads like exactly what you’d expect when someone of reasonably average intelligence, but with no experience of the legal system other than what they’ve seen on TV, does some minimal reasearch and then tries to slap together a ‘legal-sounding’ document.
It’s legal, in the same sense that woo-medical claims are scientific, as in – it borrows the words that real people who know what they’re doing would use, but uses them in a way that is completely incomprehensible to experts, but sounds impressive to layfolks.
For example – ‘defraud [him] of [his] rights’. To defraud someone, there has to be an element of deception involved. I’m assuming that Mr. Silverman found the correct and accurate word ‘deny’ to just be insufficiently impressive-sounding for his purposes. This sets aside the issue of whether he actually has any rights to defend himself in the first place, which is something he would have to prove, and should be alleging here. If he does have such rights, they’re surely different between the private, contract-based, context of his employment with AA, versus the reporter-subject relationship that he is in with respect to Buzzfeed. Those are (if they exist at all) two completely separate rights, presumably descending from separate origins.
A lot of the rest is just supposition. He’s alleging that the allegations of impropriety have made him unhirable (as opposed to the allegations of sexual assault). This seems a difficult case to make. Is he planning to depose everyone he sent a resume to, in order to find out specifically why they didn’t hire him? Would he do the same to his lost fans/subscribers?
It reeks of ignorance and desperation.
snarkhuntr@10
I can’t speak to the use of legal terminology, but I find the phrase “unhirable as if he were a criminal” unhelpful. Would that formulation ever be used in a legal complaint? I understand that he wants to show harm, but it presupposes a whole world of how criminals are perceived, how it affects their hirability, and how that perception applies to him. How would he even begin to support such a claim?
@#7, snarkhuntr:
I’ve found that a lot of schools and larger institutions (like churches) have a single typewriter hidden away somewhere, primarily so that they can easily create typewritten individual labels. (If you use an inkjet printer, the ink is water-soluble, and if you use a laser printer you can’t safely run the sheet through a second time after any of the labels have been peeled off.)
snarkhntr@10 wrote:
In a take-down letter just prior to filing the defamation suit I mentioned above, his lawyers actually included this gobsmacking bullet point:
“On Feb. 19, 2019 at 8:31a.m. you stated, ‘She did nothing wrong. That Fucking piece of shit did.’ This statement is defamatory and false because Mr. Mignogna is not a piece of shit (that is another name for feces, thus it is impossible for him to be a ‘piece of shit’) nor did he commit any crime…”
I have no problems with that.
My response is: “Very well, prosecution shall commence forthwith and we’ll ensure you go into General Population”.
Sigh.
Just learned Silverman has been on alt-righter Sargon’s podcast on an episode titled “Feminist Tyranny” and has basically gone full anti-SJW. Here’s what he has to say:
And in response to someone saying he was “pulling a Dave Rubin”:
Soooooo disappointing. :-(