lawsuits

Trump Sues ABC and Stephanopoulos For Defamation. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.

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I LOVE This Lawsuit! It Might Be the Best “Great Stupid” Lawsuit Yet!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Mohammad Yusuf, a 43-year-old Chicago police officer, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city because it refuses to allow him to change his race from “white” to “of color,” or something. The Chicago police department allows cops to change their gender identity according to whim, and he argues that this is a double standard.

Yusuf “currently identifies as Egyptian and African American.” When he first joined the force in 2004, the Great Stupid had not yet spread darkness over the land, and he only had a few race option to choose from, he says. Now he believes Caucasian is inaccurate, and besides, despite the woke Chicago police department claiming to have a race-neutral and merit-based promotion system, Yusuf claims he has been “repeatedly bypassed” for promotions in favor of less qualified black officers.

No, really? I don’t think Chicago would ever be a party to something like that, do you? Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, as the saying goes.

Did I mention how much I love this lawsuit?

Yusuf even provided his 23andMe genetic testing results to prove he is mixed race and it all depends on which he chooses to identify as when it comes to tribal designations and their DEI rewards. Still, the police department obstinately refuses to allow him to be black. It’s strange, his lawyers argue, that other officers can change their genders on official records, since no genetic test would back that up. That Y chromosome is there for life. Is this not a double standard?

“While other CPD officers are afforded the opportunity to have their gender identity corrected to match their lived experience, Officer Yusuf and others in similar positions are barred from obtaining accurate racial designations that align with their racial identity,” the suit says.

Isn’t this great?

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: How Could A Company Not Realize This Was Sexual Harassment?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The mind boggles; my mind, anyway. S&S Activewear, according to a lawsuit, proposed as a class action in 2020 by a group of former employees, pumped loud, “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic music” through at least five speakers across a large warehouse. Artists like Eminem and Lil Wayne were heard performing rap and hip-hop employing vulgar language, often with lyrics that described violence towards women.

One song cited was Eminem’s 2000 hit “Stan,” about an obsessed fan taking the rap star’s music so literally that he kills his pregnant girlfriend and himself by driving off a bridge. Well all righty then! Management shrugged off complaints about this junk being played in the Nevada warehouse according to the suit, in defiance of the company’s own sexual harassment policy. This fostered a hostile work environment environment where employees shared porn videos and made inappropriate remarks and gestures towards female employees. The suit claimed that the company’s HR manager told at least one woman to just ignore the music.

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From The Slippery Slope Files: The Case Of The Missing Movie Star [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Boy, will this ruling ever open a metaphorical can of worms!

Conor Woulfe and Peter Michael Rosza rented the movie “Yesterday” because they are big Ana de Armas fans and the Cuban-born actress was featured in the trailer. She was not, however, in the movie, her rold having ended up on the cutting room floor.

The devastated renters filed a lawsuit against Universal Pictures under California’s false advertising laws, seeking…wait for it!— $5 million in damages. De Armas, you should know, is not exactly Hollywood Walk of Fame material, at least not yet. Her biggest role to date was playing Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde,” which was notable because if MM had played de Armas, that would have been racist and “whitewashing.”

But I digress. Universal argued in its defense that movie trailers are just an “artistic, expressive work” that merely conveys the theme of the movie and is therefore entitled protection under the First Amendment. The judge was unimpressed and ruled that the suit could proceed to discovery, writing,

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Ethics Quiz: The Race-Based Job Interview Question

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I think I know where I come out on this, but I may be wrong. Let’s see what you think…

Donna Johnston, a licensed social worker, said she was interviewing to teach sociology at Bridgewater State University in Connecticut last summer when she was asked by her interviewer to contemplate and defend her “white privilege” and told that “black students may not be able to relate” to her because of it. She took the questioning to mean that she had to defend being white, and alleges in a law suit that her “whiteness” cost her the job.

Johnston’s lawyer says that “If somebody had said to a black applicant, ‘let’s talk about your blackness, or how does your blackness affect something,’ there’d be outrage.” Yes, I think that’s a fair assumption. But the school claims, in its defense, that their questioning was appropriate as a way to give Johnston an “opportunity to show … how she would use her experience and teaching skills to overcome a common obstacle as a social worker and teacher.”

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The Rest Of The Story: “The Baby On The Album Cover: Dumb Lawsuit, Valid Ethics Point”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Last August, I wrote about Spencer Eldon’s “Hail Mary” lawsuit against the surviving members of the band Nirvana over their use of his baby photo (which his parents received compensation for) in an iconic album cover above for “Nevermind.” The verdict here was that the lawsuit was doomed, he was greedy, and the law supported the band. However, I also wrote,

...Nonetheless, parents who use their children for public display are engaging in unethical conduct. Yes, they have the legal right to do it, and no, there is virtually no chance that any law will be passed banning what I consider to be child exploitation and low-level, but still unethical, child abuse. My wife and I have been watching the long-running British TV series “Call the Midwife,” and every episode requires one or more infants who are forced, without their consent, to endure the stressful experiences of playing newborns or sick baby’s under lights, in the arms of strangers, often covered with fake blood.

Elden might be insincere and the lawsuit is probably hopeless, but he’s not wrong in one respect. “[When] I go to a baseball game and think about it: ‘Man, everybody at this baseball game has probably seen my little baby penis,’” he said in one interview. “I feel like I got part of my human rights revoked.” Not rights, never rights: parents will always have the right to inflict indignities, publicity and stress on their minor offspring for fame and fortune. From the Coppertone girl to Linda Blair to “Mikey” and the kid in “The Shining,” they have all been unethically exploited by their parents, just like Spenser Eldon, without informed consent.

It’s legal, but it isn’t ethical.

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Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up 1: Rittenhouse-Free Zone Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

JFK assassination

President Kennedy was assassinated on this date in 1963, easily my most vivid memory of any national event in my lifetime. I am not an admirer of Jack Kennedy as a President or a human being, but it is hard to imagine a more wrenching disruption of the nation’s course, spirit, fate and future than what occurred that day in Dallas.

We watched everything unfold for the rest of the week on our black and white TVs, from Walter Cronkite’s somber announcement that the President of the United States was dead, to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, through to the D.C. funeral procession and John-John’s salute.

The day still represents traumafor me, and I am sure to many others of my generation: when Grace and I were planning our wedding in 1980 and November 22 was suggested as the most convenient date, I insisted on the 23rd instead. This is also the date that kicks off the dreaded holiday season, stuffed with milestones good and bad (I count seven between now and New Years), periods of anxiety, nostalgia and anticipation in between, and too much longing and memories of loss to bear.

I hate it.

1. Yes, it’s an unethical Christmas tree. In the town of Grimsby in North East Lincolnshire, the official Christmas tree has been taken down from the town center after a local uproar declaring the 10 foot, conical artificial tree a “national embarrassment.” It also cost a thousand pounds. The town’s explanation was, shall we say, confusing, with Councillor Callum Procter claiming,

There are great plans for celebrating the start of the Christmas period next week. Unfortunately, the Christmas Market tree was installed too early, and we understand that people were confused and thought this was our civic tree. The tree has been removed temporarily today and our contractors are reinstalling again, for free, ahead of the market next week. I’m looking forward to seeing people enjoying the illuminations, the market, and the revamped St James’ Square with the civic tree and the special lighting on the Minster as part of the Christmas experience.

Wait…the town is going to put the same tree back up, and everyone will like it because it won’t be “too early”? I am dubious. Here’s the tree:

bsd tree

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Depressing Dispatches From “The Great Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

moronic-idiot

I wish I could post each of these separately, but I already used up the extra hour today…

Perplexing Statement of the Week

“I understand one stab, 2 or 3 or 5, but 40 times, that’s like hate.”

That’s Jose Aguirre of Phoenix, pointing to the spot where his neighbor, Rodolfo Garcia, was brutally stabbed to death on Halloween morning. This gets Inigo Montoya’s attention:

Of course, his comment does embody the warped logic of hate crime laws, which we now should recognize as one of the early victories of those who want race and color to confer special advantages in society. I think the word Jose was looking for wasn’t hate but anger, as fury, at least as explained repeatedly by the profilers on “Criminal Minds” when they encountered a death by overkill, is the approved diagnosis with death’s like Garcia’s. I will assume that anyone who tries to stab me to death one, two, three or five times doesn’t like me very much. And frankly, those extra stabs after I’m dead won’t bother me at all. Hey, go crazy, man! It’s your time and energy you’re wasting!

A Minnesota community is confused.

What a surprise.

The city council in the Minnesota city of International Falls voted unanimously last week to prohibit dressing its sort-of famous statue of Smokey the Bear  in seasonal attire during teh year as the local tradition has been for decades. Smokey will no longer don earmuffs in the winter, or fishing gear in the summer, or the wags responsible will face fines.  No,  the iconic anthropomorphic bear cannot sport any  garb other than his traditional blue jeans, belt, buckle and “campaign” hat, with his shovel in hand.

Thank God they dealt with THAT crisis! Continue reading →

“The Queen’s Gambit” Gambit

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

the-queens-gambit-8b97b1d

In the final episode (mercifully) of the inexplicably popular Netflix series“The Queen’s Gambit,” an announcer delivering chess commentary while the show’s annoying fictional heroine, portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy (above right), competes in a climactic tournament in Moscow says,“The only unusual thing about her, really, is her sex, and even that’s not unique in Russia.There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”

That wasn’t true. Nona Gaprindashvili, the first woman to be named a grandmaster, faced and defeated many male players. Now 80 years old and living in Tbilisi, Georgia, Nona is furious about the false representation of her career. She’s suing Netflix in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, seeking millions of dollars in damages for what her lawyers claim is a “devastating falsehood, undermining and degrading her accomplishments before an audience of many millions.”

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The Baby On The Album Cover: Dumb Lawsuit, Valid Ethics Point

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Naked baby cover

Thirty years ago, Spencer Elden, age four months, was photographed by a family friend naked and floating in a pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena, California. The striking and cute photo was then sold by his parents to be the cover of “Nevermind,” the rock band Nirvana’s second album that shot the Seattle band to international fame. (Never could stand Nirvana myself.)

Through the years Elden pretty much exhausted the opportunities to exploit his accidental celebrity, recreating the wet, wild and adorable moment for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries (but not with his naughty bits exposed, of course) “It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember,” he said in an interview with The New York Post in 2016, in which he posed holding the album cover at 25. Eldon even reportedly has “Nevermind” tattooed on his chest.But this year he needs money, or has a change of heart, or met up with an unethical lawyer, or something. Now Elden is suing Nirvana for damages, claiming his parents never signed a release authorizing the use of his image on the album, and more provocatively, that his nude infant image constitutes child pornography.

“The images exposed Spencer’s intimate body part and lasciviously displayed Spencer’s genitals from the time he was an infant to the present day,” legal papers filed in California claim. Lasciviously? The album cover indeed showed Elden as a baby with his genitalia exposed. Maybe it also made tiny Spencer seem greedy, since the graphic artist added a digitally added dollar bill on a fishing line, leaving the impression that the tot was trying to grab the dollar.

Of course, he IS greedy now.

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