Frivolous libel lawsuit latest in a series for religious org that claims to support “free speech”

A federal district court judge in New York sided with the online magazine Newsweek against The Satanic Temple, finding there was no basis by the non-theistic religious organization to continue the defamation case against the publisher.

This should be the end of a case that started either three or five years ago, depending on what you want to start counting by.

The Satanic Temple, as its tax-exempt church corporation, sued the Newsweek and its reporter in February 2022 in retaliation for Newsweek publishing a critical article about TST in October 2021; that article centered on TST suing four former Washington State members in April 2020. (That is, us.) The Temple repeatedly lost their lawsuits against us over the next four-plus years, the final one ending in October 2024. We have described these as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), because that’s what they are.

As the sued reporter Julia Duin said on Bluesky late today, it sure would have been nice if anybody had paid some attention to this.

Am grateful for today's court decision in favor of Newsweek in the 3-year legal battle re a libel suit lobbed against us by the Satanic Temple. To other journos, @CJR and @Poynter: Would've been nice if you guys had deigned to cover this case or do you only notice when it's the MSM getting sued?

— (@juliaduin.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T05:36:20.619Z

If anyone — mainstream press, skeptics bloggers like Hemant Mehta, journalist watchdogs like the Poynter Institute — had bothered to cover this like they do a bog-standard press release from TST announcing some future program or lawsuit that comes to nothing. Instead, it’s just been Eugene Volokh the whole time, which is nice but seems insufficient.

The judge’s decision dismissing this case didn’t need to get into the facts of this claim the way the previous mass dismissal did a bit more back in March 2023 (see: our explainer from that year).

All that was left by now was whether the statement “accounts of sexual abuse being covered up in ways that were more than anecdotal” from Paul “Jinx Strange” Millirons was defamatory and whether the reporting of it met the standard of “actual malice“. Newsweek‘s lawyers were able to show pretty definitively its editorial process and that Duin had accurately quoted Millirons from an email when he’d said:

[a] lot of times those things were anecdotal or unsupported, but sometimes they were very concerning. Screenshots or images of things and connections I hadn’t seen before. Leaders posing happily with major alt-right media figures. Accounts of sexual abuse being covered up in ways that were more than anecdotal. Dozens of people kicked out for asking for financial records from this alleged-nonprofit organization.

Since there was no actual malice that could be demonstrated from the journalist or publication, the judge didn’t have to rule on the evidence Newsweek submitted regarding the one remaining issue of fact (sexual abuse being covered up). That is, TST couldn’t clear the first hurdle to get to other hurdles of the merit of the claim behind it.

And that’s unfortunate because discovery in this case was incredibly damning for the Temple taken as a whole, both in the realm of depositions and emails TST had to turn over, and the evidence TST submitted for itself as apparently unforced errors.

The best quote out of the whole case has come from the first major dismissal:

If Plaintiff did not want to be associated with the alt-right, the best course of action would be to avoid posing with alt-right media figures. The reporting of such an interaction (the occurrence of which Plaintiff does not dispute) is not defamatory merely because it will disappoint some of Plaintiff’s donors.

But there was also some dark stuff in here.

We won’t link it directly, but the docket includes TST calling by their government name someone who was quoting using a pseudonym in the Newsweek article and sharing the letter where they threatened to dox the military member as a Satanist to their commanding officer. That ended up actually proving a claim the ex-member had made in the article, by the way: TST retaliates against people who speak out against them. “Worst” is a competitive category here but telling everyone TST spent more than $43,000 on crisis PR services, starting with $25,000 for the guy who did public relations for the Catholic Church when its sex abuse scandal broke in the early Aughts.

But this case also more mundane things like how they discuss internal reports of abusive leadership, or how they handle a report of sexual assault by a chapter head, which is apparently “nothing” when someone tries to warn people about the leader without a police report, nothing when there is a report until people ‘”threatened to go public quote unquote, whatever that means, with the claim that TST was covering up these accusations,” and then kick everybody out if they won’t stop talking about it (“they ended up making the decision to remove everybody, anybody who was involved in any side of the case, right, just anybody who was currently a part of the police investigation”) because it was a police investigation.

We would characterize the litigation against Newsweek, journalist Julia Duin and us (and the Satanic Housewife later that year) as a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”, but TST took umbrage with that descriptor, among other things, when Newsweek repeated it, even claiming we didn’t actually spend tens of thousands of dollars in a legal defense. We did spend that much, and we bothered to prove it for a while back when it seemed like people still pretended that mattered.

Frankly, it seems like people should have cared a little bit more that the Temple’s response to ex-members criticizing them was to try to tie those critics’ governments names to Satanism at a time when Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko and Cevin “Malcolm Jarry” Soling claim it’s so dangerous they can’t use their government names in court, and Misicko says he needs an attack dog for his protection. Millirons was identified in the article as “the Wisconsin-based arch-lector of the Luciferian Dominion”, so you can say that’s fair game and goes along with leadership in something. But the other two were just people, and TST wanted to make sure other critics knew that if you spoke out against them, they’d use what they knew about you to hurt you.

Can the Satanic Temple stop Christian Nationalists? No, and we’d argue they’re on the same side, just you’re in the audience and they’re on the stage. In reality, The Satanic Temple is a threat only to Satanists.

But as we’ve shown and now Newsweek, too, they aren’t a threat if you fight back. The Satanic Temple is very bad at court cases. You can beat them. But you have to fight.