by Michael Kunzelman
AP
June 09, 2017
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A Las Vegas-based lawyer specializing in free-speech cases is representing the publisher of a leading neo-Nazi website who has been sued for orchestrating an anti-Semitic online trolling campaign against a Montana family.
Marc Randazza told The Associated Press on Friday that his law firm is defending The Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin, against a federal lawsuit that real estate agent Tanya Gersh filed against him in April.
“Everybody deserves to have their constitutional rights defended,” Randazza said. “Nobody needs the First Amendment to protect Mr. Rogers. That’s not what it’s there for.”
Meh, I’m not about to let that annoy me. She’s emotionally lashing out at people who are saying shitty things about her husband. You can’t really fault her for that. That said, Chas should have a little stronger pimp hand and tell her to shut the fuck up, because the only people saying dumber things than him at this point are his wife and daughter.
-- Marc Randazza at The Legal Satyricon, June 18, 2012 @ 9:03 pm
Gersh is represented by attorneys from the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
Gersh’s suit claims anonymous internet trolls bombarded her family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin unleashed a “campaign of terror” by publishing their personal information, including her 12-year-old son’s Twitter handle and photo.
In a string of posts, Anglin accused Gersh and other Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana, of engaging in an “extortion racket” against the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Anonymous @ aliensinthefamily.wordpress.com: Come for the spanikopita; stay for the tax evasion and the fascist meathead beating on lady leftists. Alienproofing your house. Charles Carreon: if there’s an equine proctologist on board, please ring your flight attendant call button, June 14, 2012. This is a first. I have mutual acquaintances with a shyster attorney who has been publicly shamed by Ken at Popehat. For purposes of plausible deniability, I won’t describe these mutual acquaintances, other than to say this: holy junkyard in the sky, the living arrangement in question is a motherfucking Ashland classic. That’s all I have to say on the matter. It wasn’t me. Before Ken helped publicize his recent extortion attempt, what I had heard about Charles Carreon was that he was a hippie attorney who had defended pornographers. He sounded like a principled First Amendment litigator who wasn’t ashamed to stand up for the seedy in defense of freedoms that the censorious would infringe. This is a popular public stance to take in Ashland, but oddly, Mr. Carreon chooses to present his representation of sex.com on his own website in some of the crassest mercenary terms imaginable. The self-absorption isn’t unusual for Ashland, but bragging about whoring oneself out to the highest bidder as a business litigator is. Normally, I would be hesitant to go on the warpath against an Ashlander without giving him a pseudonym, as a way of presumably keeping shit from raining down on both of our asses, but this is case is different. Mr. Carreon is a brazenly pompous ass in his public life. Instead of being ashamed of his behavior or self-aware enough to recognize that what he’s doing is sleazy but lucrative, he devotes a section of the website for his own legal practice to bragging in very pleased terms about his representation of sex.com by way of pitching his memoir about the case. If I don’t make an ass of Charles Carreon, Charles Carreon will. At Popehat, Ken has written about Mr. Carreon’s extortion attempt better and with more detail than I will. His posts on the case are very much worth reading in their entirety, but here’s a summary of the main points: (1) A highly unscrupulous online content aggregator, Funny Junk, brazenly ripped off an independent online cartoonist, Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal. (2) The cartoonist publicly criticized the aggregator for stealing his work. (3) The aggregator retained an attorney, Charles Carreon, who sent the cartoonist a letter demanding that he remove defamatory material about his client and pay his client $20,000. (4) The cartoonist, Mr. Inman, responded to this extortion attempt (which is exactly what it would be considered in most circumstances if a layman did it, unless one could weasel out of responsibility by claiming to be acting as pro se counsel) by publishing the letter demanding the money and using it as the impetus for an impromptu charity drive to raise money for bear habitat conservation and cancer research. The kicker was that Mr. Inman promised to take a picture of the $20,000 that he hoped to raise and send it to Mr. Carreon, along with a cartoon of Mr. Carreon’s mother seducing a Kodiak bear. (5) After Mr. Inman had far surpassed his fundraising goal and gotten Mr. Carreon’s face covered in egg, Mr. Carreon went on MSNBC to express his shock that he had stirred up a hornet’s nest and to accuse Mr. Inman of not playing fair by launching an online PR campaign. He accused Mr. Inman’s followers of having sent him harassing communications, which is entirely plausible loose cannon behavior, and unacceptable if true. He also expressed his offense that Mr. Inman had accused his mother of “being a sexual deviant.” Maybe Mr. Carreon is unhinged enough to actually believe this, but no reasonable person would take the bear sex cartoon literally. It was clearly a crude satire meant to annoy and offend a public figure for being an unethical attorney. (6) It’s absurd to claim surprise that a creator and publisher of crude cartoons would respond to a frivolous and unethical legal demand by insulting opposing counsel with a crude cartoon. Really, this is a case of a shyster attorney squirming because he has been called out publicly for trying to extort a cartoonist on behalf of a client whose business model appears to be copyright infringement. Mr. Carreon would rather that the dispute be resolved obscurely and discreetly in open court. Sure, the proceedings are public, but it’s a rare civil case about which the public gives a damn, so shyster attorneys can usually weasel out with no worse punishment than a brief scolding from an annoyed judge. Shyster attorneys are used to having their integrity savaged in court. That’s a game that they know how to play and, like professional football players, they’re handsomely compensated for taking the abuse. (Well, not that handsomely, but the law is generally more lucrative than being a shift leader at Starbucks, especially if you stay away from shit like pro bono work and clients who aren’t filthy rich.) What lawyers aren’t used to is being caught with their pants down (or their mothers’ dresses up in the Alaska bush) and exposed publicly as amoral shits. That’s a much harder game for shyster attorneys to play. For them, the court of public opinion is a most unfamiliar field of play. Worse, there’s no money in it. Making these mercenary assholes defend themselves in public, beyond the reassuring precincts of the courthouse, is like making Michael Vick have an uncompensated sledgehammer battle with an Andrei the Giant meathead from the Hell’s Angels in a Barstow parking lot. The difference is that Michael Vick would probably be more adaptable and resilient. Probably a fair bit more ethical about it, too. More attorneys should be made to squirm as Mr. Carreon has been. God knows more than a few of the fuckers deserve it.
-- Popehat.com
The suit accuses Anglin of invading Gersh’s privacy, intentionally inflicting “emotional distress” and violating a Montana anti-intimidation law.
Randazza, who said Anglin never directly sent any messages to Gersh, argued the suit’s allegations “leave room for disagreement” over whether Anglin did anything wrong.
Randazza’s clients have included adult entertainment websites; the 8chan online message board, a popular forum for racist internet trolls; and Mike Cernovich, a right-wing author and attorney who has promoted a conspiracy theory about Democrats running a child-sex slavery ring from a Washington pizza restaurant’s basement.
“If it’s unpopular and people want to shut it up, then we have represented them,” Randazza said.
The Daily Stormer used a crowdfunding website, WeSearchr, to raise more than $152,000 in donations from nearly 2,000 contributors to help pay for its legal expenses.
Anglin uses a mailing address in Worthington, Ohio, for his website, which takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. The site includes sections called “Jewish Problem” and “Race War.”
Other targets of The Daily Stormer and its “Troll Army” of readers have included prominent journalists, a British Parliament member and Alex Jones, a radio host and conspiracy theorist whom Anglin derided as a “Zionist Millionaire.”
Gersh’s lawsuit said she agreed to help Richard Spencer’s mother sell commercial property she owns in Whitefish amid talk of a protest outside the building. Sherry Spencer, however, later accused Gersh of threatening and harassing her into agreeing to sell the property.
Anglin’s initial Dec. 16 post about Gersh urged readers to “take action” against her and other Jewish residents of Whitefish, posting their telephone numbers, email addresses and Twitter handles.
“And hey — if you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions,” he added.