Tag: lawsuits

‘Huge mistake’: SWAT raided wrong home looking for fugitive who wasn’t there and caused $16,000 in damages, lawsuit says

An Indiana woman alleges a SWAT team caused $16,000 in damages to her home in a raid searching for a fugitive they mistakenly thought was inside using the internet to get onto Facebook, a new lawsuit said.

Amy Hadley said police launched dozens of tear gas grenades into her South Bend home in June 2022 and ransacked it, making it uninhabitable for days until fumes dissipated enough to breathe inside.

The police raid destroyed family photos and childhood drawings, clothes, electronics, and furniture, she said. Insurance partially covered the damages, but South Bend and St. Joseph County government agencies rejected her pleas for compensation.

“Amy did nothing wrong to invite the destruction that government officials deliberately inflicted on her property,” said her attorney, Marie Miller, with the nonprofit Institute for Justice, a law firm that protects property rights nationwide, in a news release. “The public as a whole, not Amy alone, must pay for the cost of that law enforcement action.”

In a statement through her lawyer, Hadley said she was traumatized.

“The raid turned our lives and our home upside down,” she said. “The police clearly made a huge mistake, but there has never been an apology for the way we were treated or an offer to cover the damage. If one of the agencies won’t take responsibility, I hope the court will make them.”

A spokesperson for South Bend declined to comment, citing pending litigation. A representative for St. Joseph County did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime.

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Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against FBI Over Access to D.B. Cooper’s Necktie

A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a D.B. Cooper researcher who hoped to force the FBI to hand over a necktie that had been left behind by the famed skyjacker. The legal challenge was brought back in March by Eric Ulis, who discovered that the piece of evidence featured an adjustable spindle that had allegedly been overlooked by investigators. The researcher argued that, if Cooper had used the mechanism, then there was a possibility that the skyjacker’s DNA could be extracted from the attachment. Ulis ultimately wound up suing the FBI in the hopes that they would be legally compelled to provide the piece to him so that the tantalizing theory could be put to the test.

Alas, the Cooper hunter had his proverbial day in court on Monday and it reportedly did not go well as a judge ruled in favor of the federal government’s request that the case be dismissed. In explaining her decision, Judge Jia M. Cobb observed that “regardless of the intrigue and mystery that shrouds the case of D.B. Cooper,” the necktie at the center of the lawsuit falls outside of the purview of the Freedom of Information Act, which Ulis cited in reasoning for why he should receive the piece. She explained that the FOIA “only compels production on ‘records,’ not tangible objects.” She went on to posit that the necktie could not be considered a ‘record’ because it “is incapable of replication or copying.”

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Over 170 of Jeffrey Epstein’s high-profile associates will be NAMED in court documents set to be unsealed in the first days of 2024

Dozens of Jeffrey Epstein‘s high profile associates are in for a New Year’s surprise as they will be named in court documents set to be released in the first days of 2024.

The pedophile’s powerful friends are set to be exposed as part of a vast unsealing that a judge ordered on Monday will take place in 14 days.

That will take the release day to January 1 – but as that is a holiday it is likely the files will be made public the following day.

Some 177 people will be identified across hundreds of files which will shed new light on the late financier’s sex trafficking operation and his network of influence.

Judge Loretta Preska wrote ‘unsealed in full’ next to the names of 177 Does who are Epstein’s friends, recruiters, victims and others whose names will be revealed when the material is released within the coming weeks.

The material is related to a defamation case brought by Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Roberts in New York against Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell.

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Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis

Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.

The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.

The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.

Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.

The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.

The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.

Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.

They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.

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New England Neo-Nazi group is SUED by Massachusetts AG over ‘violent, threatening and intimidating’ protests after they repeatedly ‘terrorized’ residents to promote white supremacist ideology

A New England neo-Nazi group is being sued over a ‘campaign of unlawful conduct’ that has ‘terrorized’ Americans they dub ‘enemies of our people’. 

The Massachusetts Attorney General has brought a civil lawsuit against NSC-131, known as the Nationalist Social Club, and its leaders, Christopher Hood and Liam McNeil, accusing them of a series of ‘violent and otherwise unlawful Club actions’.  

The lawsuit is unique in that it points to specific actions allegedly conducted by the group that go beyond their right to free speech – including storming a drag queen story time event and harassing migrants outside emergency shelter hotels. 

NSC-131 has around 30 members – thought to all be local white men – and captures its ‘violent protests’ on video to use as marketing to attract new members, as part of a growing ‘international’ white supremacist movement.  

Self-proclaimed Nazi-hunter, and founder of anti-fascist veterans group, Task Force Butler, Kristofer Goldsmith told DailyMail.com the group is motivated ‘by a deep desire to hurt people… it’s all about causing fear’.

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Court revives lawsuit over Connecticut rule allowing trans girls to compete in school sports

Opponents of Connecticut’s policy letting transgender girls compete in girls high school sports will get a second chance to challenge it in court, an appeals court ruled Friday, which revived the case without weighing in on its merits.

Both sides called it a win. The American Civil Liberties Union said it welcomes a chance to defend the rights of the two transgender high school track runners it represents. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the four cisgender athletes who brought the lawsuit, also said it looks forward to seeking a ruling on the case’s merits.

In a rare full meeting of all active judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, judges found the cisgender runners have standing to sue and have described injuries that might qualify for monetary damages. The runners also seek to alter certain athletic records, alleging they were deprived of honors and opportunities at elite track-and-field events because they say “male athletes” were permitted to compete against them.

The case had been dismissed by a Connecticut judge in 2021, and that decision was affirmed by three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit a year ago.

At least 20 states have approved a version of a blanket ban on transgender athletes playing on K-12 and collegiate sports teams statewide, but a Biden administration proposal to forbid such outright bans is set to be finalized by March after two delays and much pushback. As proposed, the rule announced in April would establish that blanket bans would violate Title IX, the landmark gender-equity legislation enacted in 1972.

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After Affirmative Action Win Over Harvard, Group Takes On West Point

The group that triumphed in a landmark Supreme Court case that struck down affirmative action policies at Harvard University earlier this year hopes to build on the victory with a lawsuit targeting similar policies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed the lawsuit on Sept. 19 with high hopes, but the organization has strayed into a legal and political minefield as the academy and the Biden administration try to block the lawsuit on the grounds that an institution training military officers isn’t subject to the same rules as private universities and that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies help, rather than hinder, effectiveness in combat.

Largely as a result of the perceived disparity between those standards that apply to private colleges and universities and those applicable to entities under federal oversight, the SFFA faces one of the most formidable legal challenges, the outcome of which will have implications for every school and academy in the nation.

Since President Joe Biden took office, a marked cultural shift has been underway in virtually all branches of the military.

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Alabama is sued by inmates who claim state made a staggering $450M by ‘convict leasing’ – and forcing them to work in fast food joints like McDonald’s and Burger King ‘for next to nothing’ in move ‘similar to cotton-picking’

A group of current and former prisoners are suing Alabama state alleging they made $450million by forcing them to work in fast food chains for ‘next to nothing’. 

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday at the Middle District Court, claims the prisoners were forced into a ‘modern-day form of slavery’ by the state. 

It says they were ‘entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money’ while the state kept the profits of their labor. 

The plaintiffs said they are regularly forced to work at McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, and Burger King franchises, Anheuser-Busch distributors, and meat processors. 

According to the complaint, inmates, ‘live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed, or raped… and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more.’

The lawsuit accuses government agencies – including the Alabama Department of Corrections – and over two dozen state officials, including Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall, of violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Alabama makes $450 million a year from forced labor, according to the complaint, which says since 2018, 575 private employers and over 100 public employers have ‘leased’ labor from Alabama prisons.

It says the inmates work against their will in ‘unsafe work conditions’ and the ADOC takes 40 percent of gross earnings claiming it is ‘to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration’.

In September 2023, the complaint says 1,374 incarcerated people were enrolled in the work program. 

One of the individuals involved in the complaint, Lakiera Walker, was imprisoned from 2007 to 2023. 

She said she was forced to perform long hours of uncompensated work ‘upon threat of discipline’.

Her jobs included housekeeping, stripping floors, providing care for mentally disabled or other ill incarcerated people, unloading chemical trucks, working inside freezers, and at Burger King. 

She said she was paid just $2 per day and was subjected to sexual harassment by a supervising officer.

When she was so ill she could not work, she said a supervisor told her to ‘get up and go make us our 40 percent’. 

She told Law&Crime: ‘Those women need help. They really need a voice. I knew I had to do something. I want justice for this forced labor.’ 

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Sound of Freedom Tim Ballard’s wife, Katherine, is added to lawsuit as victims claim she conspired with her husband to abuse victims on overseas trips where they were forced to pose as his wife ‘for financial gain’

Sound of Freedom Tim Ballard’s wife has been added to a lawsuit accusing her husband of sexual misconduct, including alleged grooming and abuse within the anti-sex trafficking organization. 

The lawsuit – which is one of several filed against Tim Ballard – now claims Katherine Ballard conspired with her husband for their financial gain and she promoted a ‘Couples Ruse’ that was used for alleged sexual grooming.

One lawsuit said the Couple’s Ruse involved women pretending to be in a relationship with Tim Ballard to go on missions to fool sex traffickers. However, a lawsuit claims Tim used the ruse to abuse the woman including requiring the women to give Tim lap dances and participate in tantric yoga. 

During a recent interview on the Rob Arquette Podcast, Katherine said she was aware of the ‘Couple’s Ruse’ that was mentioned in the lawsuit and claimed it was done with training. 

She also said the lawsuit has been difficult on her family. 

‘For some reason, when you decide to go against sex trafficking, people come out to attack you on that,’ Katherine said on the podcast and quoted in the lawsuit.

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Facebook and Instagram content enabled child sexual abuse, trafficking: New Mexico lawsuit

Facebook and Instagram created “prime locations” for sexual predators that enabled child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking, New Mexico’s attorney general alleged in a civil suit filed Wednesday against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The suit was brought after an “undercover investigation” allegedly revealed myriad instances of sexually explicit content being served to minors, child sexual coercion, or the sale of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez said in a press release.

The suit alleges that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram as compared to pornography site PornHub and adult content platform OnlyFans, according to the release.

“Child exploitation is a horrific crime and online predators are determined criminals,” Meta said in a statement to CNBC. A spokesperson said that the company deploys “sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to help root out predators.”

The New Mexico suit follows coordinated legal actions against Meta by 42 other attorneys general in October. Those actions alleged that Facebook and Instagram directly targeted and were addictive to children and teens.

New Mexico’s suit, by contrast, alleges Meta and Zuckerberg violated the state’s Unfair Practice Act. The four-count suit alleges that the company and Zuckerberg engaged in “unfair trade practices” by facilitating the distribution of CSAM and the trafficking of minors, and undermined the health and safety of New Mexican children.

The lawsuit argues that Meta’s algorithms allegedly promote sex and exploitation content to users and that Facebook and Instagram lack “effective” age verification. The suit also alleges that the company failed to identify child sexual exploitation “networks” and to fully prevent users it had suspended for those violations from rejoining the platform using new accounts

“In one month alone, we disabled more than half a million accounts for violating our child safety policies,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

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