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

[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.