Housekeeping note: The Popehat Report is moving to a different platform later this month.
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Report → move → platform
It should be seamless for subscribers: the mailing list should transfer.
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list → transfer → subscribers
It’s possible you’ll need to fish it out of junk mail the first time.
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you → ’ → mail
I’ll let you know.
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you → let → ?
What makes a good lawyer?
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What → make → lawyer
But being a good lawyer shares a fundamental rule with being a good doctor: first, do no harm.
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being → share → harm
Lawyers encounter people in crisis, and their first duty is not to make the crisis much worse.
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crisis → encounter → crisis
This is a straightforward task if you stay in your own lane by practicing the sort of law you know, or relying heavily on more experienced lawyers to learn a new area.
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you → stay → area
But lawyers who blunder alone into unfamiliar areas of law can make things catastrophically worse for clients.
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things → blunder → clients
Under exceptionally speech-protective American law, any defamation lawsuit faces a daunting array of legal barriers and pitfalls.
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lawsuit → face → barriers
It’s not rocket science, but a lawyer who doesn’t know the law will fail in flamboyant, expensive, and humiliating ways.
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who → ’ → ways
Moreover, defamation cases proceed under the looming shadow of a crucial social law — the Streisand Effect.
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cases → proceed → law
That’s the proposition that if you sue, or threaten to sue, over a nasty thing someone said about you, it will inevitably draw orders of magnitude more attention to that nasty thing.
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it → ’ → thing
It’s common — mundane, really — to see lawyers try their hand at a defamation case, fail miserably because they don’t understand the law, and utterly destroy their client’s reputation in the process.
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they → ’ → process
Nikko D’Ambrosio is a Chicago 33-year-old employed in the age-appropriate activity of wandering about society in a backwards hat trying to get laid.
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D’Ambrosio → employ → hat
One of the young women he dated wrote about him on the Chicago chapter of a popular Facebook group called “Are We Dating The Same Guy,” a forum for women to commiserate about the men they date.
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they → date → men
Her gripes (as reflected in the exhibits to his eventual lawsuit, linked below) were, to my taste, rather mild: unflattering, but not outside what’s expected of modern manchildren.
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what → reflect → manchildren
She said he was “clingy very fast,” that he “flaunted money very awkwardly,” that he “kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side,” and that he texted her from a different number after she blocked the first one.
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she → say → one
Another woman claimed D’Ambrosio had slept with her and then ghosted her.
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D’Ambrosio → claim → her
Yet another said she had heard that he sent a bunch of rude texts after a women declined to sleep with him.
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women → say → him
Still another referred to him as a “psycho.
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another → refer → psycho
”
Most of these were statements of opinion (“psycho” without more is an opinion-based epithet, “clingy” and “awkward” are thoroughly opinion-based) and very difficult to establish as defamatory statements of fact.
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clingy → base → fact
The claims that D’Ambrosio ghosted a woman after sleeping with her or texted another rudely after being rejected could be false statements of fact, and therefore potentially defamatory, but a sensible grown-up would walk them off.
Nikko D’Ambrosio was aggrieved.
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D’Ambrosio → ghost → them
He needed good, competent advice.
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He → need → advice
A sensible, competent lawyer would advise him that any defamation claim would face substantial legal challenges, that recovery was unlikely, and that the cost of litigation would be heavy.
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cost → advise → litigation
Just as importantly, a competent attorney would advise Nikko D’Ambrosio that suing over these statements would be permanently disastrous for his reputation, and that any such lawsuit would go viral.
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lawsuit → advise → reputation
A competent defamation attorney would point out that this particular factual scenario — a dudebrah with a not-common name suing women for more or less calling him a dudebrah — would be unusually bad for his online reputation, elevating him into the immortal pantheon of permanently infamous dudebrahs, a sort of Pluto of Petulance, an Ares of Assholery.
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dudebrah → point → Assholery
Nikko D’Ambrosio needed a wise counselor.
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D’Ambrosio → need → counselor
But Nikko D’Ambrosio went to The Trent Firm and hired two guys named Marc Trent and Daniel Nikolic, and they gave him absolutely abysmal advice.
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they → go → advice
If they told him about the Streisand Effect — if — he didn’t listen.
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he → tell → Effect
Instead, they filed a stunningly terrible federal lawsuit on his behalf on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, suing a few dozen people and entities.
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they → file → people
The complaint that the Trent Law Firm filed for Nikko D’Ambrosio is astoundingly sloppy and incompetent — and that assessment comes from me, an aficionado of bad lawyering, a misanthrope who seeks out and grumbles about amusingly incompetent lawsuits as a form of ritual self-abuse.
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who → file → abuse
It takes a lot to shock me, but these guys managed.
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guys → take → me
They sued not just the disappointed woman who made the key comments about him, but two of her relatives, a host of other people with unspecified roles, and a long series of entities associated with Facebook.
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who → sue → Facebook
It is impossible to exaggerate how badly drafted this complaint is.
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complaint → exaggerate → ?
The caption of the lawsuit proclaims that it’s a class action, and D’Ambrosio’s lawyers have made comments suggesting that they see themselves as suing on behalf of “victims” other than D’Ambrosio.
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they → proclaim → D’Ambrosio
But other than the caption, the lawsuit contains not a single relevant allegation about being a class action.
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lawsuit → contain → allegation
It doesn’t plead any of the factors necessary to qualify as a class action.
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It → plead → action
It’s also obviously unsuited to be a class action: a class action requires a pool of plaintiffs with factually and legally similar claims, but defamation claims are by their nature very individual and context-specific, and each aggrieved man’s case would be very different depending on what was said about them.
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what → ’ → them
A federal court can only hear a case when it has jurisdiction over the case under federal law.
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it → hear → law
…and 34 more, not listed.
The Aporia
