JonMon lawsuit

[moechus.livejournal.com]

I have offered my help to a couple of people involved and earlier this evening I attended a meeting with a few people. I thought I should make my offer public to anyone who is involved. Feel free to contact me. In particular, if you got one of those obnoxious letters offering to settle, I would be happy to write a response to his lawyer (where I think the response should go, because I suspect his lawyer is unaware of these letters and they are highly improper).

By the way, I am a lawyer.

Comments

[infinitemorning.livejournal.com]

I'm currently waiting to see if this whole suit will be thrown out of court once Ron and whatever counsel he's able to find muster a response, but I may well take you up on that. I received a letter on Saturday, but do not believe for a second that anything I've said is remotely actionable. Thank you, either way, for stepping forward.

[lizzielizzie.livejournal.com]

What infinitemorning said. Every single word applies to me as well.

And yes, thank you so very very much for stepping forward! I have been very concerned about Ron getting proper counsel.

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

Ditto me except that I got my letter yesterday (and it's dated Monday May 6). Since I wasn't involved in the LJ thread, this one takes me to task for a mix I posted to Zenrunningorder.com over three years ago, which doesn't mention him by name, but does point to the article that sparked all this, and a comment pointing to that mix in one of the recent threads (my comment also doesn't mention him by name).

Thanks you moechus.

[oneagain.livejournal.com]

If I understand correctly, he brought suit against a woman awhile back who did not respond. Though the suit did not involve asking for monetary damages, I think she somehow wound up having to pay several thousand dollars after failing to show. Whatever she did may well not have been actionable, but the failure to respond appears to have cost her, fyi. (And if I don't understand correctly, my apologies and someone please clarify?)

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

Yes, you've got it right. She didn't respond to the lawsuit, so he won a default judgment and she ended up paying his legal fees.

I'm pretty sure she could have gotten the lawsuit thrown out if she'd fought it.

In this case, however, the people who have been sent these letters are not (yet, and may in fact never be) named defendants to the lawsuit, so they are not yet required to respond. No one who has received one of these letters needs to worry at this point about losing a default judgment and ending up liable for JonMon's legal bills.

[sparkgrrl658.livejournal.com]

yeah, the letters seem to insinuate that, if you remove your comments, you won't be named, but if you don't, he will start filling in the john/jane does with your info.

but since it's not an official letter by any means, i wouldn't hold my breath.

i will however hold my breath for a counter suit if this goes to court and he wastes all these people's time and money while causing them pain and suffering.

[lheena.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about the law - is that blackmail? I know it's definitely in the spirit of it, but i don't know if it is in a legal sense.

[ron_newman]

Some of the people who are getting these letters have their LJ pseudonyms explicitly named in the lawsuit. But some don't.

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

An LJ pseudonym is not a legal identity, and being named in a lawsuit is not the same as being served with the complaint. The clock doesn't start ticking on the response deadline until you are served.

The letters JonMon has been sending out by no means count as proper service.

[ron_newman]

I agree fully. I just want to clarify that there is no one-to-one correspondence (nor a subset relationship in either direction) between the recipients of these letters and the pseudonyms mentioned in the lawsuit.

[jikamens.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been wondering about that.

As I understand it, all the letters JonMon has sent out claim that the recipient has been named as a Doe defendant in the lawsuit.

But that's clearly not the case, since it appears that some people who have received the letters did not comment until after the lawsuit was filed. Whether there will be a letter waiting for me in my mailbox when I get home today will be a definitive test of that, since I absolutely had nothing to do with any of this until I heard about the lawsuit from Popehat.

Doe defendants in a lawsuit are not interchangeable. It's not like, "I filed a lawsuit with 100 slots for Doe defendants, and now I can decide after the fact who I want those defendants to be." The Doe defendants in a lawsuit represent specific as-yet-unidentified individuals.

Maybe what JonMon means to say is that he plans on amending the lawsuit with additional defendants. But that's not what he's saying. "...you are named as a Doe Defendant in this lawsuit for making the above posts," is what he is saying. If he's sending this letter to people who were not named as Doe defendants, then he's lying.

I can't imagine that the court which hears the case will look kindly upon such deception. For that matter, I can't imagine that JonMon's lawyers are looking kindly upon such deception, unless of course they're total sleazebags.

[ron_newman]

It strikes me that there are also statute of limitations issues if any new defendants (especially those whose pseudonyms are not listed in the complaint) are added now to the lawsuit, alleging that statements they made in February 2010 are defamatory.

[cos]

FWIW, the letter I got says that he will add me to the suit, not that I was already on it, IIRC.