Thread by @AkivaMCohen

Ty, I'm wondering if you explained Rule 11 and NY"s malicious prosecution laws to your client. Because you just named a boatload of useless defendants who will do nothing but be dismissed out and have claims against your client.

https://twitter.com/Ty_Clevenger/status/1410723260254232576

Let's spend some time talking about the SLAPP suit suspended lolyer @Ty_Clevenger (well, he resigned his CA bar admission while charges were pending, anyway, per docs found by @questauthority) on behalf of his apparently rape-y client, @EdHenry

Important note before we begin: @EdHenry is not, in fact, Ed HELMS. These are, somehow, two different people. Similar names? Yeah. Do they look alike? Sort of. Is Slappy Ed Henry acting in ways an Ed Helms character might? You could say so. Are they the same guy? Definitively not

Nevertheless, will we be using Ed Helms gifs semi-exclusively throughout this thread (i.e. if there's one that fits, it goes in)? Yes. Yes we. will.

Let's start with the caption, where the astute among you will note that not a single defendant is named Jennifer Eckhart.

This is pretty important, considering that Eddie's claim is that Ms. Eckhart lied about Ed raping her and these assorted defendants believed and repeated it

Note: This thread will be periodically interrupted by life and dad duties. Sorry. Starting now.

OK, back. Let's review.

Ed Henry was a Fox anchor. With a morning show and everything. In July 2020, his former colleague Jennifer Eckhart sued him (and Fox), accusing him of violent rape in a hotel in 2017, among other awful things. Other women have come forward with harassment accusations

Fox fired Henry in June 2020, after conducting an investigation. Henry is already suing Fox in a separate lawsuit, and I imagine that he has defamation counterclaims against Eckhart in her suit.

So what's this nonsense about?

Well, once Eckhart's accusations became public, random people on Twitter called @edhenry a disgusting, raping, menace of a sex-pest. Henry didn't particularly like that, so he's now suing <pauses to count> 37 of the twitter randoms, selected (AFAIK from par 1) at random

BTW, "random people on Twitter were talking about this, and I don't like it" isn't my snappy summary of this lolsuit.

It's @EdHenry and his lolyer @Ty_Clevenger's own description

Ed thinks that Jennifer's suit isn't going well, because *some* of the claims in it may be dismissed. Without detail on which claims, and I'm not doing that deep dive, it's impossible to tell whether that's a fair characterization or not.

This led to an open letter to Fox, and Henry's idiot lawyer pauses in his complaint - which, spoiler alert, is going to get yeeted out of court in spectacular fashion - to trash talk about how *Eckhart's* counsel don't know how to win in court.

This is not a wise move, dude.

Also, no, Ty-not-admitted-in-NY-disciplined-in-DC-resigned-in-California-Clevenger, that isn't remotely a violation of NY's rules of professional conduct. Clients can always communicate directly with the adversary as long as it's not at the attorney's suggestion.

I'd tell Ty to spend some more time studying the Rules of Professional Conduct, but multiple state bars have already tried that and since he just filed a frivolous SLAPP suit it doesn't look like it worked for them.

Meanwhile, Ed makes things even more ridiculous. Defending against Eckhart's lawsuit, Henry files what he says are seductive pictures she texted him. Here's Eckhart's response - and Henry's characterization of that in this complaint

Ed Henry seems to have a teenage daughter, and, apparently, even mentioning that fact is "dragging his teenage daughter into" this.

BTW, @EdHenry, if Eckhart mentioning that you have a teenage daughter is "dragging her into it," what the fuck do you call including "she dragged my teenage daughter into it" as an allegation in your separate complaint against 30+ twitter randos?

Like, and I know this is a separate absurdity, but YOU AREN'T SUING ECKHART HERE. So adding allegations that you think paint her in a bad general light ... how is that relevant? Father of the fucking year here, injecting your teenage daughter into the allegations of your SLAPP

Not going to go through the entire list of parties, except to make two points.

First, we're likely rolling with the "separate people on the internet said similar things so that means it's a conspiracy" argument, and y'all, that is NOT a thing.

Second, this case is in Federal court on diversity jurisdiction - federal courts can only hear cases about federal law, and defamation isn't federal law, or where the parties on both sides of the "v." are citizens of different states - and he is suing a boatload of anons!

How in the world can you allege that the Court has jurisdiction because the parties are from different states when you affirmatively plead that you don't know where more than half of your defendants live??

Y'all, this isn't a small issue. If the court doesn't have subject matter jurisdiction, it literally has no authority to hear the case. None. Not even to dismiss it for being frivolous. And you've pled that you don't know whether there's diversity

OK, daddy duty calls again. Be back.

Now we get into the allegations against the specific defendants. Note that the Complaint pleads that NY law applies, arguing that "many of the tortious acts occurred in" NY. This will be a major problem for Henry.

Look, if you've followed me for any length of time, you know that public figures - and if you're an anchor for a major network who appears on its national morning show, you're a public figure - have a very high bar in alleging defamation.

They need to plead (and eventually prove) "actual malice", which sounds like it means "the person who said these things wanted to hurt me" but *actually* means "the person who said these things knew they were false, or at least thought it was likely they were false"

New York has taken that standard and applied it to essentially any speech, about *anyone* - public figure or not - if the speech is in connection with an issue of "public interest"

What's public interest? Here's how the statute defines it:

"'Public interest' shall be construed broadly, and shall mean any subject other than a purely private matter."

So is this very public iteration of a Me-Too accusation being reported on in the media and playing out in the courts a "purely private matter"?

So our accused rapist Plaintiff, Ed Henry, who appears to me - based on publicly available information - to be an absolute garbage person, is going to have to at least allege that each of the random individuals & entities he's suing didn't actually believe Eckhart when they spoke

Again, spoiler alert

Let's dig in! First up, Thrive Global, which - checks notes - published an article by Eckhart.

BRB, client work

For a certain value of "right back", as it turns out. Sorry, between a closed daycare, client work, and cooking for Shabbos, today is going to be A DAY. But we'll keep this rolling, I promise

This, by the way, is the thing that Thrive Global published: An open letter from Ms. Eckhart, detailing the abuse she's gotten since coming forward with her accusations, and offering advice to other victims of abuse.

thriveglobal.com/stories/brave-…

Go read it, and circulate it widely, because censorious asshat @EdHenry, who hates the first amendment, doesn't want you to. So retweeting this is literally a thing that anyone offended by this bullying lolsuit can do to push back

thriveglobal.com/stories/brave-…

That's also the sum total of the allegations against Thrive Global. They are never mentioned again. Is there any factual basis alleged for Henry's claim that Thrive published "with reckless disregard" and "maliciously"?

Actually

In other words, the claim against Thrive is dead as a doornail, because it fails the "Twiqbal" plausibility requirement we've discussed before (this thread has some detail on it, complete with an Asghar Bukhari example)

https://twitter.com/AkivaMCohen/status/1332380693607886852

Next defendant? Andrew Rossow, an Ohio attorney who was pretty active on Twitter defending Ms. Eckhart and even *gasp* tweeted her accounts of Ed Henry's abuse

Is there any evidence that Rossow was actually Eckhart's PR consultant? Not that we've seen so far, but that's a meaningful allegation, at least. What hasn't been alleged? Actual malice.

He also apparently has a podcast, and certainly, even talking about Ed Henry's apparent habit of harassing women, ESPECIALLY if it involves receipts, is actionable.

And OMFG, are you kidding me? Your allegation that Rossow was "conspiring" with Eckhart is just based on those comments?

That's not how this fucking works, Ed.

Now on to Debbie Almontaser, a random twitter user who had the temerity to call sexual predator @EdHenry a sexual predator.

This, of course, is defamatory, since the dictionary confirms that being a sexual predator makes Ed a garbage human being

Again, this is the full allegation against Dr. Almontaser; @edhenry and @Ty_Clevenger don't even vaguely gesture at thinking about maybe conceivably trying to attempt to plead that Dr. Almontaser - like me - didn't fully and reasonably believe that Ed is a sexual predator

And this, friends, is how it goes. The next several pages are just alleging that various twitter accounts identified noted sexual predator @EdHenry as a sexual predator.

If it seems like I'm begging to be sued ... I am. @Ty_Clevenger isn't dumb enough to try it.

And to be clear, my opinion that @EdHenry is a sexual predator is entirely based on the public reports of his history of sexual predation - the accusations by multiple women, the comments that it was an open secret that he's a sex addict, etc. Just, you know, to disclose the

facts on which I based my opinion that @edhenry is a despicable, disgraceful, sexual predator who should be exiled from polite company and not allowed near women and children (not that he's alleged to have sexually preyed on kids, just women; he's just a bad role model)

As far as I'm concerned, the behavior described by Henry's accusers here ABSOLUTELY qualifies as sexual predation. usatoday.com/story/entertai…

Oh, they also included "random twitter people called me a rapist" in their series of "fact" pleadings explaining that they're suing twitter users for talking about the accusations against him

Oh, they also appear to have intended to sue @TeaPainUSA, including him with a section like all the other defendants, but neglecting to list him as a defendant

But @edhenry isn't limiting himself to suing people who called him a sexual predator, rapist, assaulter, etc. Oh no. He's suing @LesRoseSyracuse for the crime of even referring to Eckhart as a victim.

Ed is smart enough to claim he's suing under Maryland law (Maryland's anti-slapp is useless; it's limited to communication with the government). But unless I missed something, all of the defendants he's identified are based in NY

And you probably don't get to claim that some guy exercising his first amendment rights in NY to discuss sexual predator @edhenry is subject to Maryland law. With its anti-slapp law, NY announced a strong public policy of affording its citizens the freedom to exercise their

1st Amendment rights on issues of public interest. That policy would be meaningless if it only applied to plaintiffs who were also based in NY.

And that's particularly true where Henry is suing in NY.

No, he's stuck with this anti-slapp law.

And y'all - that's it. That's the whole complaint. It's a frivolous, nonsense mess that doesn't comply with defamation law and is an assault on ALL of our first amendment rights.

BTW, if any of the defendants in this are looking for a lawyer, they should reach out to me, or @j_remy_green, or @wolmanj, or any of the other NY based attorneys who have expressed their outrage at this censorious nonsense.

I guaranty you, there are a bunch of us chomping at the bit to be the one with the chance to leave @edhenry looking like this at the end of the suit. And that's not an "if" with a complaint this bad. It's just a "when"

Coda, h/t @adamsteinbaugh: no, there's definitely no diversity jurisdiction

https://twitter.com/Garyatty/status/1312167399907442689?s=20