Nutty Trollish Guy On The Internet Files Nutty Trollish Defamation Lawsuit In Random State

From  Mike Masnick at TechDirt:

"Okay, look. We’ve really tried to ignore Chuck Johnson. It’s pretty obvious that he’s the kind of guy who does a bunch of the stuff that he does to get more attention. We’ve never covered his various hilarious legal threats, though you can see a bunch of them nicely cataloged at this website. If you’re not aware, you can do some Google searches, but suffice it to say that he plays a “journalist” on the internet, and he’s somewhat infamous for the various stunts he pulls, combined with his penchant for threatening people with libel, as well as for many of his biggest stories being, well… ridiculous. A few weeks ago he threw something of a public tantrum because Twitter kicked him off its service. He had a lawyer in Missouri, John Burns, send a ridiculous threat letter to Twitter, based on an interpretation of the law that might be described as “crazy” by some and… “wrong” by many others.

But, now, by all accounts, it appears that Johnson has actually filed a defamation lawsuit in Missouri against Gawker (who is currently fighting a big (and much more important) lawsuit concerning the Hulk Hogan sex tape excerpt that it published). The lawsuit is equally as nutty as most things associated with Chuck Johnson, but go ahead and read it. The one thing that’s important to note is that there hasn’t, yet, been confirmation that it’s actually been filed, but at the very least someone put work into it.

By all public appearances, the only reasons that this was filed in Missouri was because… that’s where Johnson could actually find a lawyer willing to file something so ridiculous (the same lawyer who made the silly threats against Twitter) and, perhaps, because Missouri lacks a real anti-SLAPP law. It has one, but it only applies to petitioning the government. All the more reason to support a federal anti-SLAPP law."

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