Tag: lawsuits

Metaphysical Shop Owner’s Lawsuit Over Pennsylvania Fortune Telling Ban Moves Ahead

Following a legal victory earlier this summer, a metaphysical shop owner’s lawsuit over Pennsylvania’s ban on fortune telling could go to trial next year. The compelling case dates back to October of 2023 when the Serpent’s Key Shoppe and Sanctuary in the community of Hanover received an unexpected visit from the borough’s police chief, Chad Martin. Rather than picking up some occult supplies, the lawman instead offered a rather worrisome warning to owner Beck Ravenswood about the possibility of legal trouble should they violate the state’s 165-year-old law against divination. “He informed me basically he is not here to arrest me or press charges,” the shop owner recounted at the time, “however, if he ever gets a report from anyone, he will be back on my doorstep.”

The incident understandably did not sit well with Ravenswood, who filed a civil rights lawsuit against Martin and the town of Hanover in August of 2024. Nearly two years later, the case is still winding its way through the legal system, with the shop owner recently securing a significant legal victory. “The DA’s office had been trying to dismiss my case,” Ravenswood explained to a local media outlet, “saying it wasn’t important enough for the court to rule on.” However, they received word in June that the request had been rejected. “Judge Wilson finally looked at the evidence and said there’s a compelling argument here, and we need to determine what is really at the heart of this lawsuit,” Ravenswood said, “is it about witchcraft, or is it about freedom of speech? That’s really what it is.”

In a conference call between the parties on Wednesday, a discovery deadline was set for November 30th, and what the shop owner has cleverly taken to calling the ‘Hanover Witch Trial’ was added to the court’s calendar for June of 2027. That said, Ravenswood’s attorney reportedly indicated that they intend to request a summary judgment on the constitutionality of the law, which could eliminate the soothsaying ban once and for all without the need for any further court proceedings. Meanwhile, regardless of how the case ultimately unfolds, the antiquated restriction may not be on the books for much longer, as a state legislator introduced a still-in-committee bill that would repeal the restriction last June.

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Zohran Mamdani’s Rent Freeze Just Got Hit With Its First Major Lawsuit

The first lawsuit against Zohran Mamdani’s latest rent freeze on New York City apartments was filed Wednesday, as a group of landlords moved to overturn the New York City Rent Guidelines Board’s decision. 

The suit argues that the Board went through a “sham process” before voting 7-1 in June to impose zero rent increases on one and two-year leases. Although the Board is supposed to operate independently, its members can be appointed and removed by the mayor at will. In fact, six of the current board members were appointed by Mamdani.

While the Rent Guidelines Board is required to review the economic conditions of the residential real estate industry before voting, the lawsuit alleges that it cherry-picked the data, underestimating operating costs and overstating the money landlords were receiving in order to justify its decision. The suit also points to the resignation of one board member before the vote, noting that the landlord representative quit in frustration after concluding the board had ceased to function as a fact-finding body and that her former colleagues intended to freeze rent no matter what the evidence showed.

“Zohran Mamdani promised to deliver a rent freeze during his campaign and then he went to extraordinary lengths as a new mayor to guarantee it,” Randy Mastro, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said. “This is a perversion of the process.”

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Erin Brockovich’s crusade against data centers is going crowd-sourced

Erin Brockovich is getting Americans to report data centers in their backyards.

The renowned environmental activist, whose work inspired the Julia Roberts film “Erin Brockovich,” launched a registry of US data centers in April, inviting nearby residents to report how the projects are affecting their communities.

Speaking in an interview with podcaster Theo Von, released on Sunday, Brockovich talked about how she woke up one day to find 30 emails from people talking about the issues living around data centers.

“So I created what’s called brockovichdatacenter.com, where people, if they were having issues with data centers in their backyard, could self-report,” she said.

“This is a place where people who I believe are living, breathing, and experiencing these issues are the best source of information,” Brockovich added.

According to her May Substack post, she launched the registry on April 27. She said on the podcast that within 72 hours of launching the registry, the website crashed twice because of the volume of reports.

Brockovich said the reports shared a common thread: Residents had not been informed about the data center projects by their city councils and often woke up to find construction underway.

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Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.

About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Alsup had dealt the case a mixed ruling last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024.

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You Can’t Make This Up: Illegal Alien Convicted for Killing Ruby Garcia, SUES Trump for “Humiliating” Him by Highlighting His Crime in Campaign Ads — Demands $75.5 Million, Counseling, and U.S. Citizenship

A Mexican national illegal alien who brutally murdered a young Michigan woman is suing President Donald Trump from prison because the President told the truth about him.

Brandon Ortiz-Vite, currently serving a 39-to-102-year sentence for the cold-blooded murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia, has filed a handwritten federal lawsuit against President Trump and White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Steven Cheung.

The illegal alien claims Trump “humiliated” him and turned his life into a “nightmare” by using his case as an example of Biden’s open-border bloodbath during the 2024 campaign.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported in March 2024, Ortiz-Vite was an illegal alien from Mexico who had already been deported under the Trump administration in 2020 after a drunk driving arrest.

He snuck back into the country and, on March 22, 2024, shot his girlfriend Ruby Garcia multiple times in the head during an argument, dumped her body on the shoulder of U.S. 131 near Grand Rapids, and fled in her car. He later turned himself in at a church and confessed.

The Gateway Pundit documented at the time that Ortiz-Vite had been ordered removed by an immigration judge and physically removed to Mexico on September 29, 2020, only to re-enter illegally and claim another American life under the Biden-Harris regime.

Trump visited Grand Rapids days later and rightly highlighted the case as a prime example of the deadly consequences of open borders. Campaign ads featuring the killer’s mugshot and status as an illegal alien who had already been deported once aired nationally, MLive reported.

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The Absurdity Of The Hunter Biden Defamation Case

I have taught torts, including defamation for over 30 years, but I have never seen the like of the Hunter Biden defamation case.

The defendant made defamatory statements and then just refused to appear. That led to an equally bizarre $1.7 million award by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson of the Central District of California to Biden, consisting of just $1 in nominal damages and the rest in punitive damages.

Here is the most interesting line of the opinion: “the damage to Plaintiff’s reputation is difficult to calculate.”

It may be the single greatest understatement in the history of judicial opinions.

However, the court also noted “Plaintiff does not seek actual damages above a nominal amount.”

That means that Hunter Biden’s counsel, in a default case, elected not to argue for compensatory damages due to loss of reputation. Why would he do that?

It might be that he has little reputation to lose and that opening up that part of the case was fraught with perils.  However, it also created a potential major appellate issue. His counsel was making it clear that they were litigating purely for punitives.

For Hunter Biden, this is a much-needed windfall. His art sales notably collapsed with the value of currying favor to the Bidens. He is reportedly being pursued by creditors, including former counsel.

The question is whether the award will stand.

For many critics, Hunter Biden is virtually ‘libel proof” as an individual who has no reputation to lose. However, as we have previously discussed, that status is reserved for the most reviled personalities who cannot be defamed due to the lack of any positive reputation.

Judge Wilson, a Reagan appointee, admits in his opinion that determining reputational harm to someone like Biden is difficult to do and further recognizes the argument that “prior tarnishing of Plaintiff’s reputation may reduce the reprehensibility of Defendant’s conduct.”

The case involves a claim by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne that Biden took part in an $800 million bribery scheme involving Iran and failed to defend his claims in court.

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New York Times Countersues Trump DOJ After EEOC Accuses Newspaper of Discriminating Against White Male Employee

The New York Times has filed a countersuit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after the agency accused the newspaper of discriminating against a white male employee in a promotion decision.

The EEOC sued the Times in May, alleging the newspaper used Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) hiring practices that favored women and minority candidates in violation of federal civil rights law.

The agency is seeking to block the company from continuing these policies and is also seeking damages on the employee’s behalf.

According to the EEOC’s complaint, veteran editor Bryant Rousseau was denied a promotion to deputy real estate editor in favor of a multiracial woman who lacked his experience covering real estate.

The agency also alleges that none of the four finalists for the position were white men.

In a countersuit filed Friday in federal court in New York, the Times accused the EEOC of targeting the newspaper in retaliation for its reporting on the agency.

“The Commission markedly deviated from its ordinary practices in almost every respect to file the flimsiest of lawsuits against The Times, a frequent target of the administration, on the heels of investigative reporting that brought to light scathing bipartisan criticism of the EEOC, its leadership, and its priorities from both inside and outside the Commission,” the complaint states.

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Communist Influencer Hasan Piker Gives Pete Hegseth Grounds for a Potentially SERIOUS Lawsuit

Communist influencer Hasan Piker went off on War Secretary Pete Hegseth and FOX News in one of his recent streams and said things about Hegseth that would probably give him grounds for a lawsuit.

Piker said that Hegseth has Nazi tattoos, which is so false that it’s absurd. But he also called Hegseth a rapist, which is libelous.

Piker clearly thinks he is untouchable. Hegseth may want to remind him that he isn’t.

Piker began his rant by going after FOX News.

Via Mediaite:

During the scathing attack on Fox News, Piker said, “Fox News is RapeTV, okay? It’s the pro-rape network. The candidates that it puts forward and defends — many of which are rapists. The hosts, some of the most prominent hosts on the network, were such prolific rapists that other women who were on the network had successfully sued them. Okay, the idea that this is — all of a sudden these fucking liberal blowhards are endlessly pontificating about the dangers of sexual violence and sexual assault. They’re one step removed from starting to talk about fucking rape culture.

Then he went after Hegseth:

One of their rapist hosts is now the fucking Secretary of War — Pete Hegseth — who also has a Nazi tattoo on his motherfucking chest. A Nazi tattoo that actually got him dinged by the National Guard, which stopped him from participating on the inauguration security detail — something he wrote about in a motherfucking book. And he was such a prolific rapist that his own mother sent him an email begging him to stop.

That guy with a drinking problem, who’s also now the Secretary of War — that guy used to be a host on this network for years — and they’re over here acting like, “Wow, I can’t believe it, the Democrats did this.”

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The ABA Wants The White House’s Receipts On The Biglaw Executive Orders

In 2025, Steve Bannon said the quiet part out loud, on his own podcast, when it came to the Trump administration’s goals when issuing (unconstitutional) executive orders aimed at Biglaw firms. Bannon said of the targeted firms, “What we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you.” Now the ABA wants to know how much of that he was really involved with.

In a Tuesday filing in American Bar Association v. Executive Office of the President, the ABA asked U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to force the White House to hand over internal communications, including those involving Bannon and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s personal senior counsel. According to reporting, Epshteyn connected two firms that struck deals with the administration, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, with the Commerce Department on matters related to U.S. trade negotiations.

The ABA sued the administration back in June 2025, arguing that the executive orders, plus the wave of “deals” that spooked firms into capitulating before an order ever came for them, amounted to a coordinated policy, not isolated grievances against a handful of firms. As noted when the suit was first filed, the ABA had reason to worry about standing before it ever got to the merits, given this particular Supreme Court’s track record on associational standing.

Those worries didn’t pan out, at least not yet. In April, Judge Ali rejected the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, finding the ABA had plausibly alleged a real threat of retaliation and a documented chilling effect on its members, including instances of firms declining pro bono work seen as adverse to the administration. That ruling is what put the case into the discovery fight now playing out over Bannon, Epshteyn, and the rest of the internal White House record.

The underlying grievance predates the ABA suit by months, of course. Four firms — Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — fought their individual executive orders in court and won, repeatedly, sweeping the district court level on First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment grounds. Nine other firms didn’t fight, cutting deals worth roughly $940 million in pro bono commitments to Trump-approved causes instead. And DOJ’s posture toward the winning firms has been anything but consistent: in March, the department dropped its appeals of those district court losses, only to reverse course about two weeks later and go back to defending the orders, this time citing the nine capitulating firms as proof the policy worked exactly as designed.

The DOJ, as you’d expect, does not want to produce any of this. The government has argued the requests raise separation-of-powers concerns and are overbroad, and last week, it asked a federal court in New York to block the ABA from deposing Epshteyn altogether. Whether that gambit works is now Judge Ali’s problem; DOJ’s response to the ABA’s Tuesday brief is due July 17.

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Radical Trump-Hating Clinton Judge Orders Trump to Pay E Jean Carroll $5 Million

Radical leftist Judge Lewis Kaplan on Wednesday ordered President Trump to pay E Jean Carroll $5 million – plus interest – after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s bid to toss the sexual abuse case.

Judge Kaplan mentored E. Jean Carrol’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation) when they worked together previously at a law firm.

A Manhattan jury previously reached a verdict in the E. Jean Carroll rape/defamation case and ordered Trump to pay her $5 million.

In 2019, E. Jean Carroll alleged Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990’s.

Trump has denied the allegations and called E. Jean Carroll a “whack job” who’s “not my type.”

Carroll previously said ‘rape is sexy’ and a ‘fantasy’ – CNN’s Anderson Cooper was so disturbed he cut to a commercial break.

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