Devin Nunes Loses Yet Another SLAPP Suit, This Time In California

from the anti-slapp-ftw dept

Fri, Jul 1st 2022 10:46am - Mike Masnick

Devin Nunes’ campaign to intimidate and silence his critics with a flood of SLAPP suits has hit another stumbling block. While he and his lawyer, Steven Biss, had mostly avoided filing lawsuits in states with strong anti-SLAPP laws, including his “home” state of California, for some reason in the fall of 2020 he sued Twitter and someone named Benjamin Meredith in California state court. ... The lawsuit implied that Meredith was connected to the @DevinCow account that has vexed Nunes for so long. From the initial complaint:

Meredith controls multiple anonymous Twitter accounts that he uses multiple times daily to viciously attack Plaintiff. With Twitter’s knowledge and direct participation, Meredith in violation of § 1708.7 of the California Civil Code has used Twitter in the past two years to deploy thousands of incendiary and hateful comments with the intent to injure, alarm, harass, dox and intimidate Plaintiff.

A somewhat bizarre part of the lawsuit is the claim that while Meredith himself is not behind the @DevinCow account, he may be married to the person behind the account. This may be tough to follow because none of it makes much sense, but Nunes filed a declaration (this all starts on page 110 of the massive document removing the case to federal court) in the lawsuit saying that his attorneys connected Meredith to the @DevinCow account by finding a WordPress blog that showed a tweet that simply claimed (with no evidence) the name of the person they believed was behind the DevinCow account, and naming her (locked) Twitter account. That account had a bio description that read “Mom, wife, therapist, dog friend.”

Nunes’ declaration then states that his lawyers searched and found another Twitter account with the same bio — “Mom, wife, therapist, dog friend” — belonging to Meredith’s wife. If this all seems like quite a stretch, well… yeah.

There were two main claims in the case: stalking and common law commercial misappropriation (because of products mocking Nunes). Early on in the case, Nunes dropped Twitter from the lawsuit. Meredith removed the lawsuit to federal court and filed an anti-SLAPP motion under California’s anti-SLAPP law.

And, well, let’s just say that Judge Jennifer Thurston is not the first judge who is less than impressed by a Biss/Nunes production dismissing the complaint under California’s anti-SLAPP law. She does, however, allow Nunes the opportunity to file an amended complaint, so this is likely not over yet.

{snip}