Tag: sued
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr. Sued Daily Kos -- And It's Not Going Well For Him

Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.

To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused. We protect our community at all costs. Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn’t do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.

It’s been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling this month, it’s way past time to catch everyone up.

This has become a critical free speech case, with what’s called the ”Dendrite standard” at stake. In short, the Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3 ruling states that anonymous speech is protected unless all of the following apply:

(1) the plaintiff must make good faith efforts to notify the poster and give the poster a reasonable opportunity to respond; (2) the plaintiff must specifically identify the poster's allegedly actionable statements; (3) the complaint must set forth a prima facie cause of action; (4) the plaintiff must support each element of the claim with sufficient evidence; and (5) "the court must balance the defendant's First Amendment right of anonymous free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant's identity."

Put another way, a plaintiff better have a damn good reason to violate an anonymous poster’s free speech rights in order to force a media organization to unmask them.

This test, suggested by Public Citizen and the ACLU in an amicus brief, was originally adopted by a New Jersey court in 2001. Ever since, Public Citizen has avidly sought to enshrine it in additional states. One of the missing states? New York. Public Citizen has assisted our defense team and represented our community member as an opportunity to enshrine the Dendrite protections in New York.

The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York’s role as a major news media and distribution center.

After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you’ll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds.

[He] does not live or work in New Hampshire, he has no meaningful contacts with this state, he did not consult any New Hampshire sources when writing the article, he did not mention New Hampshire in the article or otherwise ‘direct’ the article to this state, and he had no reason to anticipate that the ‘brunt’ of the (alleged) injury to Kennedy’s reputation would be felt in New Hampshire—particularly since Kennedy is not a resident of New Hampshire and his connections to New Hampshire are, at best, attenuated.

Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy’s lawyer didn’t file in time—and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi.

Freakin’ hilarious! So our intrepid community member, who ultimately unmasked himself, is in the clear! But that doesn’t mean the broader case is over.

Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member’s identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue.

We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights. (Fun fact: The press is the only profession specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.)

On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York’s anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits “strategic lawsuits against public participation.”

Here’s how one of our lawyers, Adam Bonin, described the court order: “A New York appeals court is unanimously allowing Daily Kos to proceed on claims that RFK Jr. had no right to try to unmask one of our users and that his attempts to do so violated New York's anti-SLAPP rules, which may entitle the site to seek damages against him.”

Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren’t letting him weasel out of this.

We’ve been able to fight this fight on behalf of our valued community because of your generous support.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Feds Sue Big Banks Over Mortgage-Backed Securities

NEW YORK (AP) — The government on Friday sued 17 financial firms, including the largest U.S. banks, for selling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities that turned toxic when the housing market collapsed.

Among those targeted by the lawsuits were Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Large European banks including The Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank and Credit Suisse were also sued.

The lawsuits were filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It oversees Fannie and Freddie, the two agencies that buy mortgages loans and mortgage securities issued by the lenders.

The total price tag for the mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie and Freddie by the firms named in the lawsuits: $196 billion.

The government didn’t say how much it is seeking in damages. It said it wants to have the securities sales canceled and wants to be compensated for lost principal, interest payments as well as for attorney fees.

The government action is a big blow to the banks, many of which have seen their stock prices fall to levels not seen since the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. Until now, the stocks have been undermined mostly by unrelated worries about the U.S. and European economies.

It is particularly damaging to Bank of America, which bought Countrywide Financial Corp. in 2008 and Merrill Lynch in 2009. All three are being separately sued by the government for mortgage-backed security sales totaling $57.5 billion.

After Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase was listed in the lawsuits with the second-highest total at $33 billion. Royal Bank of Scotland followed at $30.4 billion.

Bank of America has already paid $12.7 billion this year to settle similar claims. Last month insurer American International Group Inc. sued the bank for more than $10 billion for allegedly selling it faulty mortgage investments.

In a statement Friday, Bank of America rejected the claims in the government’s lawsuits.

Fannie and Freddie invested heavily in the mortgage-backed securities even after their regulator said they didn’t have the needed risk-management capabilities, the bank said. “Despite this, (Fannie and Freddie) are now seeking to hold other market participants responsible for their losses,” it said.

Bank stocks fell sharply on Friday as news of the government’s lawsuits emerged. Bank of America tumbled 8.3 percent, JP Morgan Chase fell 4.6 percent, Citigroup lost 5.3 percent, Goldman shed off 4.5 percent and Morgan Stanley’s ended down 5.7 percent.

Residential mortgage-backed securities bundled pools of mortgages into complex investments. They collapsed after the real-estate bust and helped fuel the financial crisis in late 2008.

The FHFA said the mortgage-backed securities were sold to Fannie and Freddie based on documents that “contained misstatements and omissions of material facts concerning the quality of the underlying mortgage loans, the creditworthiness of the borrowers, and the practices used to originate such loans.”

The FHFA filed a similar lawsuit in July against Swiss bank UBS AG, seeking to recoup more than $900 million in losses from mortgage-backed securities.

Also sued Friday were are Ally Financial Inc., formerly known GMAC LLC, Deutsche Bank AG, First Horizon National Corp., General Electric Co., HSBC North America Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, Nomura Holding America Inc., and Societe Generale.

JPMorgan, Goldman, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the lawsuits. Ally Financial said in a statement said the government’s “claims are meritless, and the company intends to defend its position aggressively.” A spokeswoman for First Horizon said the bank intends to “vigorously defend” itself.

Ken Thomas, a Miami-based banking consultant and economist, said he expects the banks to settle soon with the government.

“This will be nothing but a distraction to them and the quicker you settle something like this the better,” he said.

Christina Rexrode contributed to this report.

DSK Victim Sues New York Post For Libel

Over the weekend, the New York Post published sensational allegations that the maid allegedly raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn had “turned tricks on the taxpayers’ dime,” working as a prostitute while under the protective custody of the New York District Attorney’s office. Today, the AP reports that the victim has sued the Post for libel.

The New York City hotel maid at the center of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex assault case has filed a libel lawsuit against the New York Post after it called her a prostitute. The woman’s lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, filed the claim Tuesday in Bronx state Supreme Court. A series of Post articles over the weekend said the 32-year-old was a “prostitute,” and “hooker” and that she “traded sex for money.”

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