Religion News Association Conference panel talk

What Reporters are Getting Wrong: Lawsuits, Bias and the Nature of Truth” – David Johnson, a former reporter and editor at the Odessa American in Texas, was one of four Seattle-area Satanists known as “Queer Satanic” who were sued by The Satanic Temple from 2020 to 2024 in federal and state courts.

Transcript lightly edited for clarity and to remove filler words.

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Transcript

Hi. Thank you for inviting me to this.

Unlike my fellow panelists, I am not a person who usually does prepared speaking, so I apologize in advance for that.

I am “A David Johnson”. I was a former copy editor and reporter and ultimately interactive editor of a daily newspaper in West Texas called the Odessa American. Since then, I have moved to Seattle and done other work, and the more recent and relevant thing is that I am a Satanist and I was sued by an abusive religious organization in a series of frivolous lawsuits for four and a half years.

To be clear, I do not believe in or worship the devil. I do not do animal sacrifices, blood magic, etc. No, this is not the Church of Satan and, no, the Satanic Temple isn’t bad for that sort of thing. They’re bad for more mundane reasons.

If you walk away from this with nothing else, I want you to walk away with the understanding that you cannot avoid a lawsuit.

I know that some of you probably saw, you know, the list of who’s going to be a speaker, and it’s like, “Okay, ‘How to Avoid a Lawsuit’. Guy got sued for four and a half years. He probably has some pretty good advice of what he did wrong that I can avoid so I’ll be okay.” And I need you to understand that people don’t just get sued because they deserve it; sometimes they just get sued and there is nothing you can do to prevent that. It is really important that you understand that for yourself and also for other people around you that are in your life or that you’re covering. It’s not just people who deserve it that get sued.

This is America, and in America we have the freedom that we can sue anybody. “The law in its majestic equality allows rich and poor alike to spend tens of thousands of dollars filing frivolous lawsuits and amending complaints and appealing them and filing them in new courts.” The law will not protect you from ruinous costs. You need to understand that even if you do nothing wrong, even if you follow the law completely, someone can still come after you.

In my case, I can say I did nothing wrong. By that I mean: in four and a half years of litigation, we won at every step. We kept getting dismissals. We kept having the judge come down on our side, and TST just kept coming after us. You might say, “Well, you didn’t do anything ‘wrong,’ but you did criticize someone powerful.” In my specific case, I posted on Facebook pages how the leaders of this religious organization had not lived up to their stated values — with specifics. I linked to other former members and what they had said, previous statements by these leaders that were negative but their own words, and TST called this defamation. They couldn’t prove it in four and a half years of trying, but they were still able to sue me.

You might look at that and say “Well you were kind of aggressive. You know, you picked a fight you. If you didn’t want to get bit, you shouldn’t have poked the bear.” All right. Also, I chose to fight. Me and my co-defendants chose to fight.

But another woman in Texas, another ex-member, she made two TikTok videos with factual, true statements about things The Satanic Temple and its owners had done that were bad, such as the fact that they’ve advertised being able to give people a religious freedom loophole to abortion that is false. They’ve known it’s false. It’s never worked in all of the times they’ve tried it in court, but they advertise on literal billboards. She pointed that out, that was false. They sent her a series of legal threats and said, “If you don’t record a retraction, we’re going to sue you.” She capitulated. She read the retraction on video, and they sued her anyway.

You could say, “Okay, well, she she capitulated, but you know, she shouldn’t have said this stuff. I mean, she should have known that these people were litigious right?”

My co-defendant Nathan Sullivan did nothing wrong. And when I say he did nothing wrong, I mean he did nothing wrong. He was a founding member of the local Seattle group for TST. He was a volunteer for five years. He gave five years of his life to this organization, and then in December (I believe) of 2019, he wrecked his car because he was so tired from working a full-time job and basically working another unpaid part-time volunteer job. He went on sabbatical, basically, and said “I just need a few months of my own.” And while he was gone, he got cc’d on a complaint about a way a sexual harassment incident had been handled within this organization. When several of us got kicked out, he was one of the people that got kicked out. Five years of his life, he did not get a word directly. He didn’t get any explanation. He was just gone. He couldn’t log into a Discord server, basically, and then a few weeks later, he got served papers. He did nothing, he did nothing, and he got sued. And he was sued for four and a half years, the same as the rest of us, just because they thought he was part of an “organization” that did not exist and never has existed.

So, you just have to accept that “it is a legal system and not a justice system,” and sometimes powerful people just want to hurt you. If you’re a reporter, you need to be okay with that. You need to be okay with doing reporting where something bad may happen to you, and you cannot stop it from happening.

I think right now a lot of reporters do work with certain structural flaws that they’re not necessarily aware of, and that gives them some protection that they don’t always think about.

So, everything that the previous speakers have said is true. You should follow all of those good practices. I don’t want to say that’s not so. But right now reporting tends to defer to power at the expense of truth. And by that I mean, like Sarah Tesoriero was saying, if you quote an official police press release, you’re probably going to be okay. Right? You’re probably going to be okay. But police lie. Police will just lie in a press release, and then it’ll come out like weeks later. “Okay yeah, they lied.” But you’re not going to get in trouble for quoting their lie because it’s an official source with power.

If you are repeating approved talking points, if you are (instead of being a journalist) a very accurate stenographer for power, you will probably be okay. Not guaranteed, but probably.

I think that that is a thing that is not worthwhile to do. I think that it is important to be writing stories that are worth getting sued over and that means that sometimes you’re going to make powerful people upset and you’re not just going to be an amplification of of their lies.

I think that there is a problem with the sort of structure of how you define who is and is not an official source. For example, if you are deferring to a press release that comes in because a person with wealth has a nice letterhead and you go, “Oh, this, this is somebody.” Like, if you got an email from just some guy, “This is a crank,” maybe you don’t pay attention to it. But an official source with the letterhead? Well, now you want to pay attention to this.

And it’s going to frame what the story is. They’re going to make a claim, and you’re going to go and find “the other side,” but the other side that you find is probably going to be also some other powerful person, some other institution that is trustworthy (to you) is known. And while you’re saying that you’re doing objectivity and balance, you’ve decided what the two sides are. For example, with the Satanic Temple, usually TST makes a claim that is false, and reporters don’t go and talk to former members about it. When TST says that they can help people get religious abortions, reporters don’t talk to actual abortion access orgs. Reporters go and they talk to Christian nationalists, they talk to reactionary evangelicals, and those people say, “TST, they’re, you know, they’re evil. We want to keep Satan out of our schools. Keep Satan out of our healthcare clinics,” whatever. Then the reporter goes back to TST’s website, says, “They don’t actually worship the devil,” it’s done.

But truth has not actually been pursued or found out there because no one has asked “Has this ever worked before? Have they ever succeeded at these lawsuits?” Because they haven’t, and those stories don’t come out because it takes a lot more work to dig and talk to smaller people, especially smaller people that, I think, are more scared of getting sued by them than a powerful church, a powerful, like, chaplain program, etc.

The last thing is individual biases. Often times reporters believe that it’s an inherently more interesting story that, “What if Satanist were the good guys? What if not, ‘dog bites man,’ Satan is bad, but ‘man bites dog,’ what if Satanists were the good guys?” I think there is a just bias towards like wanting to believe that’s true because it’s more interesting, and that very simple story will reward you. You’re not gonna get sued over it if you say, “Satanists are the good guys,” and you’re gonna get a lot of clicks.

So, “how do you avoid a lawsuit?” You can’t. But you need to be writing stories that are real, that are actually increasing the amount of truth in the world and not just propagating falsehoods for powerful people.

When you are attacked, you do need to fight. This is the other thing that I would say: I understand that everyone has their own individual reasons for things, but the way that these sort of things work is that powerful people can crush anybody but they can’t crush everybody. If they come after one person, they can wear you down with legal fees and whatnot. And we won our case. We won, but we still had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, lots and lots and lots of money. And I think that was worthwhile. I think it was worthwhile for us to do and prove it could be done, but what we didn’t get was a lot of solidarity.

And I am not a journalist anymore. I do writing things, but— just as a show of hands, I guess, who knew that that Julia Duin was being sued, and Newsweek? Does anybody…? Okay, who saw writing about it, who saw reporting about that case? Because the only reporting I saw anywhere was the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog on Reason.com. That’s it.

So a satanic organization sues a reporter as an individual (and Newsweek) for saying that it was defamatory to say that they engaged in frivolous libel lawsuits, and that story was not interesting enough…?

It didn’t come in a press release. That wasn’t given to someone for them to point to the press release and then go, “Now we’re going to talk to the other side.” And a lot of people when they found out about it were like “Well if I keep my head down, I’ll be okay.”

I think that that is that is bad. I think that you do not have to die on every hill, but we all are going to die, and you should pick the hill that is worth it for you. You should fight. And when you see someone else fighting, you should join them, when you can. You should call attention to it. You should make it very, very difficult to bury people in silence because that’s they’re counting on. They’re counting on intimidating people who will not even bother to fight back.

I am a Satanist, and that means, to me, you have to fight tyranny even when it’s omnipotent and even when you expect to lose. As long as you can keep the rebellion going, you have not lost, and if you want someone to do it, you have to accept that you have to be that person.

I always say, “You are what you do repeatedly; you become more of what you practice at.” And I think that you can pray or you can be the answer to someone’s prayers, but regardless of whether you do the former, you should be doing the latter.

That that’s my talk. Thank you so much for having me.

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Now, after this talk was delivered, The Satanic Temple did end up appealing its district court loss against Newsweek and its reporter Julia Duin for writing about us, so unfortunately that story has not got a happy ending yet.

Meanwhile, TST co-owner Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) continues to have a very normal one, talking about the case on his Substack but without, yanno, linking back to the court case or any of the filings he references, or any outgoing links it seems like, actually. Misicko’s sycophantic audience will likely not notice or care, but one would hope at some point folk would want to look at the docket and filings for themselves instead of trusting a guy who keeps losing court cases to accurately describe why his abusive religious organization keeps getting its shit kicked in.

Maybe we’ll do a closer reading of Misicko’s article, maybe not. But The Satanic Temple sued us repeatedly and lost repeatedly. TST sued a magazine and reporter for writing about us, and they lost. TST and its owners are as incompetent as they are malicious.

They may threaten you or even sue you for speaking out against them, even when it is actively counterproductive and dipshit move on their part, but know that they will lose if you stand up for yourself and fight back against them.

Hail Satan.