Does Josh thinks he really has a case against LFJ? "LFJ convinced businesses to drop me for the horrible content I host. This is illegal."
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and I am not Null's lawyer. What I write below does not constitute legal advice. I am merely expressing my personal opinion about a pending case on a public forum. Only a barred lawyer can give you legal advice.
Apparently he thinks so. The problem is that there is a free speech component in this case, not just on the part of plaintiff - Null feels that he's being censored by LFJ and denied his freedom to conduct a legal business, which would constitute denial of rights - but that free speech right also extends to the defendant. Liz Fong Jones is allowed to use verbal or written communication to protest KiwiFarms, and he is allowed to urge others, the #dropkiwifarms volunteers, to do the same, but within the bounds of the law, which #DropKiwiFarms repeatedly transgressed by their own public admissions (they later deleted all those tweets to cover up, but KF has the backups). Is LFJ interfering with Null's businesses if he is merely contacting third parties, like ISPs, that do business with Null, like ISPs, in order to protest Null's businness conduct with them?
At what point does LFJ's right to protest turn into unlawful harassment that interferes with Null's ability to run a business?
If Null does sue LFJ in California, then I suspect this case might go the same way the Manson case went: Null said he hopes to use his case to perform discovery on LFJ to find out what he was up to during #DropKiwiFarms Null has complained that ISPs wouldn't even tell him what LFJ was complaining about, and that he was thus kept in the dark about which material on his website were potentially infringing. Naia - who was part of #DropKF but later left the group in disagreement at their tactics - suggested in a Twitter thread denouncing #DropKiwiFarms that they were supposedly sending false CP complaints to ISPs to get KF removed. Naia also alludes to #DropKiwiFarms attempting to deny Null access to legal representation. Supposedly, LFJ & Co were harassing Null's lawyers by contacting their other legal clients, unrelated to Null, and asking them to drop Null's lawyers, thus hoping that Null's lawyers would drop him over this harssment of their other clients, and Null would thus be left without legal representation. Null also suggested that #DropKiwiFarms personally harassed his lawyers by showing up at their offices and going through their trash (he never provided any evidence for this but presumably Null's lawyer would be able to testify under oath that this really happened). Null is hoping to use legal discovery to obtain the correspondence that was exchanged between LFJ, the volunteers, and all of the ISPs that #DropKIwiFarms reached out to. Unfortunately, Null is gonna find out that a lot of that contact went over Signal (as they admitted on Twitter), which is a privacy-oriented disappearing communication medium, but perhaps LFJ or others kept screenshots of their Signal threads, which would constitute discoverable evidence.
Since this is California, and CA has very strong Anti-SLAPP precedents, I fear Liz will do what Evan Rachel Wood did with Manson's lolsuit against her, and just
file an anti-SLAPP motion claiming that whatever was said between Liz, the volunteers and the ISPs during #DropKiwiFarms was 1A protected speech activity, thus essentially turning the tables on Null and placing the burden of proof entirely on him. I hope Null's lawyers have already warned him that
the moment an anti-SLAPP motion is filed, discovery is almost completely quashed. Manson, who unlike Null is a multi-millionaire rockstar, was able to pay his team of lawyers (Null might actually want to look up
Manson's lawyer and give a call to, if he thinks KF can help him afford a rockstar lawyer) to endlessly chip away at the anti-SLAPP motion to enable Manson to perform some form of limited discovery and, more importantly, be able to put the plaintiffs on the stand to be deposed (albeit on a set of very limited set of questions) under oath. Manson could chip away at an anti-SLAPP motion with his rockstar millions, but I don't know if Null has that kind of money. Again, this is speculation, and I do not know what Null is actually planning to do or which specific laws he is planning to invoke against Liz Fong Jones. He said on MATI that this might go to Federal Court as well as State Court, so we'll see.
