This brief post is an addendum to my Sunday’s story “How Lipscomb & Co take advantage of unrepresented defendants,” where I described how the troll makes up accusations of spoliation and perjury out of thin air to compensate for the total lack of admissible evidence.

Today Raul tweeted the link to a defense counsel’s letter to the judge. This letter tells a gruesome story of the very same tactics but employed during a deposition.

In this case (Malibu Media v. John Doe, NYSD 14-cv-10155), like in a myriad of other ones, the defendant’s hard drive was examined and came out clean. Nonetheless, Lipscomb’s local puppet in New York Jacqueline M. James did what would probably qualify as blackmail if done outside of the course of litigation:

Dissatisfied with the lack of evidence of infringement and existence of testimony denying same, Malibu’s counsel falsely accused Doe of destroying evidence and reiterated her intention to depose Doe’s significant other (wrongly identified by Malibu as Doe’s wife). In person, at the deposition, the undersigned reiterated Doe’s objection to producing Doe’s significant other and indicated that no evidence exists as to infringement by Doe, such that testimony from any other person concerning same has no probative value and would be pursued only for purposes of harassment. Malibu’s counsel reiterated Malibu’s intention to depose Doe’s significant other and potentially other parties.

Likely soon-to-be jailed Prenda’s attorneys employed exactly the same approach: the crooks threatened to harass family and neighbors in a hope a reputation-wary innocent defendant would give up and pay the ransom.

 

Earlier Lipscomb/James tried to pull another Prenda-worthy sleaze: to make the judge sign grossly overboard “preservation order,” mainly aimed at greasing inevitable manufactured claims of spoliation if defendant wouldn’t settle and if no evidence of XArt’s obscenities would be found on his hard drive. Judge Forrest apparently saw the truth and denied this travesty. Also, the judge specified an unusually tight pre-trial schedule. She set 12/7/2015 as a trial date and explicitly said that “The Court is unlikely to adjourn the trial date.” The defendant is in good hands, so I don’t expect him to settle, and since Libscomb’s litigation strategy abuse of courts doesn’t have a room for jury trial, expect a dismissal any time soon.

Update

9/9/2015

Disgustingly unsurprising: the more obvious that the troll doesn’t have a lint of evidence — the more effort is invested in fishing gear. Today the Miami center drafted a motion to depose Verizon — without any coherent reason. And why not? There was no work involved (this is a cookie cutter motion seen in the past), and there is no downside whatsoever as the likelihood that a prevailing defendant gets back what he was robbed off is minimal.

Yet the smell of desperation is overwhelming…

Followup

• Yet another New York judge is not happy about Malibu Media’s predatory conduct