Thread by @AkivaMCohen

Hey, #LitigationDisasterTourists, in a SHOCKING twist, Sandmann has lost his defamation cases. Let's read the order, shall we?

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Gonna skip past the procedural background and get to the description of the evidence on the motion:

So, how did Sandmann's deposition go?

I mean, look, it's not a disaster, but when you're suing people for writing that you blocked someone's path, *this* testimony isn't going to be helpful

"How dare you publish Phillips' statements that I blocked his path, although I can understand why he perceived it that way" is going to be bad enough. But layer on the "I wanted to stand up for my school so I deliberately didn't move to let him pass"?

Meanwhile, here's Phillips: "Yeah, that's exactly how I perceived it"

And look, I'm just going to pause here to note that no plaintiff will or should EVER be able to win a defamation case that turns on "yeah, the events in question happened, but I insist your completely rational interpretation of them is wrong"

Which, um ... longtime followers of this account already know pretty well

I'm a little concerned that it looks like Sandmann never deposed these folks, but "yeah, seemed to the rest of us like he was intentionally blocking him" isn't going to help Nick.

There's a fellow student's declaration that apparently didn't say anything meaningful (he had left the group by then and didn't see anything). Then we get a summary of the video evidence

Let's pause for a second here and note that as the adult here, Phillips should have asked Sandmann to move rather than got into a pissing contest with a teenager. But it was *obviously* a pissing contest Sandmann wanted; he 'wasn't going to be intimidated' and I get why Phillips

could have concluded that asking would have been pointless. -my own opinion, for whatever that's worth

After a brief digression to say "no, guys, the fact that I didn't dismiss it doesn't mean that 'opinion' isn't a defense, just that you alleged enough to make whether it was opinion an issue of fact", the court gets into the law

Back in a sec

Summing up: "interpretations of a situation are not defamatory unless it's presented as based on undisclosed facts"

And here's Kentucky law saying the same thing

With all that background in mind, and particularly Sandmann's testimony, you can see why suing media outlets for accurately quoting Phillips' description of events wasn't necessarily going to end well for Sandmann

Like, this isn't hard. And lack of defamation liability doesn't turn on randomly inserting the words "as I perceived the situation ..." into your descriptions of things

Again, none of this surprises anyone with a functional understanding of defamation law. And it shouldn't surprise anyone, really. Do we really want a rule that says you can't offer opinions on someone else's behavior?

I'm going to skip past the paragraphs of "any reasonable reader would have understood Phillips was describing his own perception of events" because

And that's it. The end - of the opinion, and of the delusion that Sandmann had a viable defamation claim or settled with anyone for gobs of money

There's a bigger point here, so I'll respond in this RT also: Because litigation is expensive, and they decided to see whether Sandmann would take less than it would cost them to "win" the case in order to just go away

To get to this point, each of the Defendants participated in discovery - depositions and document production - briefed their own summary judgment motions (opening and reply) and opposed Sandmann's summary judgment motion. Conservatively, they're at least at 6-figures in costs

Faced with that reality, some businesses will turn to the plaintiff and ask if they'll take 10K, or 25, or 50 to go away (the amount depends on the Defendant's particular spine and business circumstances).

Others will take a longer view, and look at the cost of winning as an expense of preventing similarly bad faith suits, or setting good precedent, or some other broader business goal, and spend more to win the case than they'd have needed to pay in a settlement.

Those are both valid decisions, though philosophically I prefer clients who take the latter approach (which, yeah, is also usually good for my short-term bottom line if they're my clients) since there's a societal benefit.

But why did they settle, @Holden114? Dollars & cents.