April 13, 2022

The Satanic Temple continues to lose SLAPP case against four former members

Federal court on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2021 decision dismissing TST’s accusations of cyberpiracy and defamation

Order on Motion for Reconsideration — Document #30

We love a judge telling The Satanic Temple to get fucked, especially when it’s TST suing us.

This is a piece of good news that we knew was coming for a while, but is still gratifying to see the court’s decision in writing.

The vast majority of The Satanic Temple’s SLAPP suit against us consists of the Temple trying to claim damages then refuse to prove they actually happened, while also invoking laws and rules and trying to get them to mean the opposite of how they’ve been understood for decades.

Luckily for us, The Satanic Temple is as incompetent as they are malicious.

Building a whole religion out of making money for a failed cargo cult messiah, a dipshit eugenicist & their roadies necessarily means there’s going to be a lot of corners cut along the way.

So it’s unsurprising when The Satanic Temple’s arguments fail with any level of scrutiny.

It’s just as unsurprising that they keep groping around hoping that they can just fail upwards and bank on the court’s sense of object permanence miraculously suspending itself, just because that’s how they sucker donations out of the general public everywhere else

No, you can’t strongarm the court into letting you carve out your own backdoor blasphemy laws by suing whoever criticizes you too loudly

No, getting to customize your own URLs on someone else’s website is not the same thing as having your own domain.

(Guess they don’t teach that stuff at Harvard.)

Unfortunately, sycophants of The Satanic Temple will likely not stop and say, “Has TST been lying to us and misrepresenting their suit against four former members for two years?”

They’ll say, “It’s the judge who is wrong.”

But again, never take our word for it.

Just read for yourself and see what your reaction is before you check in with someone who will tell you to ignore your own lying eyes, mind, and emotions:

The court agrees with Defendants that TST’s novel argument that Facebook
should be considered a “domain name registry” is not supported by existing caselaw or
by the ACPA’s legislative history. Because TST has not met its burden to show either
manifest error in the prior ruling or new facts or legal authority which could not have
been brought to the court’s attention earlier with reasonable diligence, see Local Rules
W.D. Wash. 7(h)(1), the court DENIES TST’s motion to reconsider the dismissal of its
ACPA claim.

The defamation claim was never really in doubt. It was “the sort of defamation claim a petulant child would file after a round of name calling on the playground, and it was appropriately dismissed with prejudice,” as Social Actuality described it in their analysis of the suit after the last round of filing.

Likewise, Facebook owns Facebook pages. If you have a problem with a Facebook page, you submit a ticket to Meta, you don’t file a federal lawsuit expecting to win on merits. This is not complicated stuff, and again, it is good news but not surprising to have this re-affirmed.

No photo description available.

So that’s the good news: once again, The Satanic Temple’s bad arguments have failed in court.

The bad news? That’s still just taking care of Counts #2 and #5 from the original complaint that had already been dismissed more than a year ago.

This was just The Satanic Temple running up our bill some more with frivolous, failed motions we had to answer

This is a SLAPP lawsuit where The Satanic Temple has thrown a lot of legal spaghetti at a wall in the hopes that any of it sticks, forcing us into even more costly legal proceedings that already have cost us $80,000 despite winning 7 out of 7 motions so far.

Although we got a full dismissal of all claims in February 2021, we still don’t have final resolution on:

  • Count 1: Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA) violation
  • Count 2: Tortious interference
  • Count 3: Trespass to chattels
  • Count 4: Conversion
  • Count 5: Trademark Dilution under 15 USC § 1125(c)

So there is still a road ahead of us, how long we still don’t know. But today was a good day. If you want to take part in this joyous day with us, have got your tax rebate, and are looking for a good place to donate it—why not some Queer Satanic Heretics?

Legal Fund for Victims of Satanic Temple

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The Satanic Temple's Boogeyman

Queer Satanic

TST sued us from April 2020 to September 2024, and we are still here.