Judge's anti-SLAPP ruling in Manson case shows how malicious actors abuse the law

Before MeToo went into full swing, the Summer 2015 edition of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Public Policy was warning of the abuses of the anti-SLAPP laws to protect false and defamatory claims in the name of “public interest.” The journal noted the anti-SLAPP laws were originally  intended to protect workers and labor organizations who criticized working conditions or corporate policy from being sued. As we see today, anti-SLAPP laws are a way to clear court dockets of cases in which the truth is a questionable commodity, and principally benefit women making accusations against public figures in politics, media or entertainment. Only in a state like Virginia that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law is why justice in the Johnny Depp defamation trial and the phony gang rape story against a University of Virginia fraternity that appeared in Rolling Stone had a chance of being served.

Anti-SLAPP laws are now so broad that it has gone beyond just an average citizen commenting on or interpreting the words or actions of people who are not even “public figures,” but to protect defamatory claims made by people solely on their word without evidence and without due process. Even when the target’s livelihood and reputation is destroyed because of false or unproven claims before recourse to due process rights, accusers are protected from prosecution by anti-SLAPP laws. We have seen many cases where the victim of false claims find that there is no point in suing an accuser because these laws protect their "free speech" right to make false claims, even with "actual malice."

So now we come to the Marilyn Manson case, where last week Judge Teresa Beaudet released a 37-page ruling which essentially ignored all the important claims against Evan Rachel Wood and Ilma Gore, and gutted the defamation case against them. It was the UK judge in the Depp libel case all over again: it overlooked demonstrably false claims by the defendants, declined to see the “merit’ in an admittedly falsified document, was blind to the orchestrated conspiracy (with the help of a “checklist”) by Wood and Gore to get others to make evidence-free claims against Manson, and generally relied on the “believe all women” mantra and the anti-SLAPP provision  that the truth did not really matter:

…any written or oral statement or writing made in a place open to the public or a public forum in connection with an issue of public interest, or any other conduct in furtherance of the exercise of the constitutional right of petition or the constitutional right of free speech in connection with a public issue or an issue of public interest.

That means you can say that your house was invaded by Martians and you were gang-raped by them on the orders of some public figure, and you have a “right” to be “believed.” Sure, people can say you are crazy, but if you believe it, or it is in the furtherance of a “public interest,” then it is the “thought” that matters, as the Rolling Stone editor who wrote the defamatory UV article tried to “justify” herself with.

Much of the ruling centered around the short film “Groupie,” where it was claimed that at least one of the participants was “underage”—meaning under 18. I have already written about the absurdity of the belief that 16-year-olds don’t know their own minds, but the issue seemed to be what proof there was that there were any “underage” participants. We are presented with an absurd discussion by the judge about whether Gore was lying, didn’t know and just “speculated” that there was, and whether Wood’s failure to ascertain the truth and just put it in her “Phoenix Rising” documentary as being “true” was or was not inherently defamatory.

Throw in the fact that a named individual was not only not “underage” at time (she was 21 or 22), and that she had not committed suicide as Gore and Wood had “heard” was not "relevant" to the charge that they were just making things up as they went along regardless of the damage it was causing to another person's life.  Colonel Kurtz interviewed this alleged “victim” on her YouTube channel, who revealed she had been interrogated by a Los Angeles detective and testified that everything that Wood and Gore claimed about the video shoot was a fabrication.

None of that mattered to the judge. It’s OK to destroy a man’s life and “reputation”—admittedly in Manson’s case the latter is a bit hard to do—because any speech short of advocating murder is protected as long as it is to the cause of a sacrosanct “public interest,” as is violence against women, even when there is a question of a claim being true or just malicious. On the Metro buses I ride every day there are signs about “Sexual misconduct—comments, gestures and behavior—is off limits on Metro. I you see it, report it.” Well fine, except that you typically never see that “behavior” on the bus (just people ignoring the ordinary rules and being rude and disrespectful), and it seems to me that it is just gaslighting by some activist group paying Metro for advertisement, encouraging people to make false complaints either to excuse their own behavior, or because it happens “all the time” and they might as well make their own “interpretations” based on their “feelings.”

Those who have been paying attention to the case thanks to Colonel Kurtz know about the fake FBI letter that was supposedly about the “threat” posed to Wood by Manson more than 12 years after they split up and it was only two years ago that she decided that the “embarrassing” activities she consented to do were really “non-consensual,” “grooming,” “sexual abuse” and we might as well just throw in “trafficking” for good measure. Actually, what seems to be the truth is that the real purpose of the falsified letter was that Wood wanted to remove herself from a custody dispute over the son she had with her ex-husband; we are told that in a court document Wood is charged with inserting her own paranoid fantasies into her young son’s mind, which essentially constitutes child abuse. Of course the truth isn’t “pertinent” to this judge’s decision-making process, and she ignored the relevance of the fake letter as suggesting that Wood and Gore were capable of lies and creating false "evidence."

There was plenty of other blah, blah, blah and yada, yada, yada in the judge’s decision. In fact, for the most part it was confusing and irrelevant to the facts. It essentially said that even lies that destroy a man’s life is “protected speech.” Most sensible people know that a country based on such an assumption is inherently unjust. We are not talking about “speech” between friends, we are talking about “speech” that the mainstream media runs with without regard to the truth and everyone knows about it and believes is “true” based simply on something someone said. How can we trust a media that even eats its own over rumors and innuendo? Hell, Fox News just replaced Tucker Carlson with Trump’s former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who regularly spewed his false election conspiracy claims.

The judge didn’t even mention Ashley Smithline in her judgment, nor was the fact that the abuse claim of Manson’s former assistant Ashley Walter had been dismissed for lack of evidence was in any way “relevant.” Manson’s attorney Howard King denounced the ruling, pointing out that “The Court telegraphed this outcome when it refused to consider the bombshell sworn declaration of former plaintiff Ashley Smithline, which detailed how women were systematically pressured by Evan Rachel Wood and Illma Gore to make false claims about Brian Warner [aka Marilyn Manson]. The failure to admit this critical evidence, along with the Court’s decision to not consider Ms. Gore’s iPad, the contents of which demonstrated how she and Ms. Wood crafted a forged FBI letter, will be the subject of an immediate appeal to the California Court of Appeal.”

What is particularly striking to me is that this judge presumes that a jury will look at this case the same way she does. A jury could certainly be suspicious of a fake FBI letter, at least one witness who recanted her claims that had been made under pressure, witnesses who denied that they were ever abused by Manson, and witnesses who say they were pressured by Wood and Gore to make false statements but refused, and witnesses who contradicted the specific abuse claims made by the accusers, as well as the lack of evidence for the claims. I would have also expected that a psychological examination of Wood be conducted, given her bizarre behavior in regard to her custody dispute with her ex-husband. We could even throw in the fact that Gore’s persona is hardly less “questionable” than Manson’s is; her motivations are certainly worth examining.

Well, good luck with that. The judge left intact for a “tentative” May 1, 2024 trial (which we can hardly believe will be a fair one if she is still the judge) Manson's claims of “hacking and wrongful impersonation.” Doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t in this case. Online impersonation is when a “malicious actor” uses another person’s online identity to harass, intimidate, threaten or make false claims against a target. Smithline in her statement charges that her social media account was “hacked” into for this purpose by Gore, but Manson will have to prove that Wood and Gore hacked into his social media sites and planted false inputs. While these are crimes, they don't touch the essential claim of defamatory conduct and false accusations.

One other thing that should be of interest in this case is the current state of the investigation into the abuse claims made by Wood and Gore. Los Angeles investigators refused to file charges against Manson based on the results of their findings, suggesting that there was no “there” there; but given the political climate they wanted LA prosecutors to make the final decision to act on it or not. The last thing this judge should want is the further erosion of her credibility by the prosecutors declining to bring charges against Manson.