Happy Frivolous Filing Thursday, y'all!

As we hit this holiday weekend homestretch, I thought it might be fun to talk about @LafayetteTravel - a city which bills itself as "The Happiest City in America," but might not be after they learn about the First Amendment. https://twitter.com/AshleyyDi/status/1301607345781452801

Here's the basic story: inspired by various online lunacy, @jbmerrifield, a New York comedian, decided to play a little joke. So he created a Facebook event - an "Antifa protest."

As jokes go, I'd rate it as "meh" (sorry, John). But it's clearly a joke.

https://www.facebook.com/events/river-ranch-lafayette/antifa-takes-river-ranch/326996312034779/

Between the "traditional ANTIFA flag-burning ceremony which will be subequently extinguished with ANTIFA spit and NAZI tears" line and the "Arms optional. Legs encouraged," you would have to have the critical reading skills of a mouldy Froot-Loop to believe it was real.

Turns out they've got some of those in Lafayette, Louisiana. Quite a few, apparently. Enough of them that despite the guy behind the prank doing media interviews saying it was a prank and other efforts at debunking, the local Y'all Qaeda crowd turned out to protect the flag.

So Lafayette had to send out a bunch of law enforcement types, presumably to both protect Lafayette from the flag protectors and the flag protectors from themselves. Which cost money.

Now there was one of two things Lafayette could have done here.

They could have publicly acknowledged the extent to which this little prank revealed the utter ineptitude of their educational system when it comes to teaching people how to figure out what was real, or they could have kept their mouths shut and avoided further embarrassment.

Except, no, it turns out there's actually a third thing they could have done, and they did it.

They filed a LOLsuit.

They're suing the comedian to try and recover their expenses related to policing their lunatic fringe. https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7o0s72q2z0r370/satire-event-lawsuit.pdf?dl=0

The copy of the suit above was obtained via KATC's website, which has more on the underlying facts - including an interview with the author of the prank.

Let's dig into the suit itself. https://www.katc.com/news/lafayette-parish/lcg-sues-comedian-over-satire-post

At the start, I should make one thing clear:

Early on in law school, you learn that absolutely everything in US law comes with a little "except Louisiana" exception. That's because the rest of the US is common law-based, and they're not. They're Napoleonic Code-based.

But you also learn in law school that every exception has an exception. And the Constitution of the United States of America is a giant exception to the "except Louisiana" exception. Much to the dismay, I'm sure, of @LafayetteTravel, the First Amendment applies in Louisiana.

But let's get to the lawsuit.

(The little digression above was because complaints are styled a little differently there than I'm used to.)

The first few paragraphs are formalistic, but normal.

And apparently all of this is Trump's fault somehow but Lafayette isn't suing Trump.

Let me be clear on two points:
First, "ANTIFA is coming" hoaxes are mean-spirited even when they're clearly jokes.

Second, the fact that various nutballs take up arms because they're scared of fake things is tragic and dangerous, but obvious jokes are obvious protected speech.

That's true even when small-town law enforcement has to deal with small-minded bigots who are caught up in self-important militia cosplay.

I'd like to stop for a second and point something out here:

The thing that "Right Side Millennial" wanted to "stand up to"? The flag burning thing? That's protected speech.

In fact, @jbmerrifield's whole hoax, had it been real, would have been protected.

The people who were showing up to counter-protest - the ones who are mysteriously not defendants - were angry at that speech, which is their right. And so long as they didn't interfere in the flag burning, they also would have been within their rights to counter-protest.

But I think it's worth keeping in mind that the "hoax" was not actually even a threat to do engage in *illegal* conduct; it was a threat to engage in First Amendment-protected activity.

Lafayette apparently investigated and determined that the threat to engage in protected activity wasn't real. But they also apparently couldn't get their gullible citizenry to believe that.

Translation:

Nobody but counter-protesters showed up. Lafayette had to police the counter-protesters who showed up. But instead of suing the counter-protesters who did show up, they're suing the guy from out of state because no protesters showed up, just counter-protesters.

The gloating isn't particularly seemly. But it is particularly protected.

And, honestly, *I* can't believe it worked either. Who the hell would have believ-- OK, can't lie. It's 2020.

AND ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THERE WAS A SECOND ONE, AND THAT WORKED TOO?

@LafayetteTravel - y'all need to check the marsh gas levels around there or something, because you're seriously scaring me at this point.

The gloating is still unseemly. But trolling is protected speech - and, frankly, no reasonable person would have fallen for this once, let alone twice.

Needless to say, of course, negligent protected speech isn't actionable. And the Louisiana statute they're citing is the "making false police reports" one. Unless he called the PD, I don't think that's got legs.

But that's not the point. This is a SLAPP lawsuit.

They're deliberately seeking less than $75,000 to keep him locked into their state courts, which they're hoping will be friendly to their attempt to use the judicial process to punish the mean person from out-of-state.

(We need federal anti-SLAPP laws.)

This willingness to maliciously use frivolous legal proceedings to punish free speech is a good reason not to travel to @LafayetteTravel.

/fin