Amy Griffin's Narrative Changed Between 2022 & 2023 - Artistic Process or Proof of A Lie?

The trajectory of Amy Griffin's storytelling creates real credibility problems, though at this stage of the case the more important question is Claudia's identity. Brendan Sorsby may be done litigating with the NFL, but I see a potential fight with Paramount on the horizon as their docuseries on Texas Tech gets ready to sir. An important update on the cases where teachers were fired for comments about Charlie Kirk's death, proving the First Amendment is alive and well. 

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The information and ideas expressed in the allegedly golden podcast are legal explanation and legal analysis, not legal advice. While I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer. If you need legal advice, please contact a licensed legal professional in your area. My opinions are my own. For better or for worse. Maybe you can hear that. Got my beverage. Um thank you for moving with me to this new day. I really appreciate it. It's just my schedule. I'm kind of trying to play with my days and my work schedule and content, and um, it makes it easier for me to be able to record this on Monday and get it out on Wednesday. So thank you for making the jump. And in fact, there aren't that really that many podcasts, at least that I listen to, that come out on Wednesdays. A lot of them come out on Tuesdays. Um, so maybe Wednesday is a good day for it. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out like how to break down content, how to find the right balance of, you know, you have to have an opening for like things that are happening right now because things get filed. It's litigation, right? And there's news stories and whatever. But then you also have to build kind of a steady pipeline of things to, you know, keep talking about cases that take a long time or issues that people want answered. And so I am still very much building how all that's gonna go. Um, and I don't really have a I don't really have a template for that in any other legal creator. Um, and so I'm trying to figure out what mine's gonna look like. So bear with me as I try out multiple different things. Um, I'm very happy that the holiday weekend is past. Um I love having my friend visit, but you know, when you have somebody in your house, I mean, even though she's like, I don't change the way I dress, I don't change the way I talk, like whatever. Um, it still just changes the regular rhythm of your house. And so today everything was kind of back to normal with everybody, you know, running around saying their usual crazy shit. I fully have a 15-year-old. That means he's gonna learn how to drive. We're trying to decide who's gonna teach him because um my husband drives like someone's grandmother, which is kind of great for teaching a teenager, right? Like he's like very like speed limit, full stop at stop signs, like that guy. And I'm kind of a bat out of hell. I follow the rules-ish, but my dad was a sports car guy, and he loved to drive fast, still does. Um, and so I learned like it's fun to drive fast. And I really like to drive fast. And we don't want, we don't want a 15-year-old learning that. So I don't know, we're gonna have to figure out how that goes. But first, he has to take a test, like an online course and take a test and all that. But that that's the first thing in a long time where I've felt like I can feel a real life. It's like an external life change. Like he is now eligible to do that. He's also gotten much taller. He's had a growth sport in the last couple of months, and he's about the same height as me now, which I think means he's on his way to being taller than me. Um, but that's kind of trippy, right? To like look your kid in the eye. I don't dislike it. In fact, I like it much, much more. I knew that I would never like having little, little kids. Some people are so wonderful with little children. I am just not one of them. I knew I would be a better parent when he got older, and I am. I'm better at listening, I'm better at connecting now. I had a really, really hard time when he was little. I did not care for. There were moments, of course, that were wonderful, and he was sweet and cuddly and all that, and there were great moments, but a lot of it was really hard. I'm just, I just don't think I'm built for that age. I think different people are built for different things, and I'm just not built for that. I think I'm built for this. So, in some ways, I kind of feel like, oh, we're finally getting into the part of parenting that I really like. But we got through the weekend, we got through the birthday, we got to see our wonderful family member. If you don't have people who are your chosen family, I hope that you are able to find some because it is a relationship like no other. Because you know that you are tight because you want to be. Not because you have to be because you're related, not because somebody told you, oh, you should always keep in touch with family. If you're close, you're close because you're meant to be close. You want to be close, you stay close. Um, and I, you know, she's an only child just like me, and my son's an only child. And so I think there's just something that bonds us. Um, you know, them together, sort of, and every there's them two, me and my friend, me and my son, like like everybody just has their own little relationship, and it's really special to me. And I'm glad I got to experience it this weekend. I tried not to read too much legal stuff because sometimes my brain just gets overloaded and I can't I can take the information in. As I've said before, I've gotten pretty good at drinking from a fire hose in terms of work, like just throw a bunch of shit at me all day and I'll just keep going. Um, but the more goes in in a short amount of time, the less I often am able to break it down and explain it because I just don't have the time for my brain to do that. And that's what I really like to do for you all. So my brain was telling me, take a break. So I did. Which was helpful because as I started reading stuff last night, again, I started reading it through kind of a different lens. Um, and I think I got some more perspective on stuff. So without further ado, let's just go straight into civil disorder. There's a fair amount of internet content being made on the Blake Lively attorney's fees issue. Um, her, you know, the judge awarded her attorney's fees for the defamation, for her getting dismissed, the defamation claim that Wayfarer filed against her. She, of course, has asked to have all of her fees paid for her entire defense of the entire Wayfair action. And there are a lot of people who are going line by line and they are looking at all of the expenses. And I completely understand why people would do that. Um, because, you know, you don't often get to see behind the curtain that way. And I'm getting a lot of questions like, is this normal? Do people really charge this much? And it's hard to answer because every firm is different, every case is different, every client is different, right? Different clients will accept different things. Um, I will say that by reading the time entries, which are not even the real time entries, they're you know put into a spreadsheet. We haven't even seen the actual invoices yet. But in reading the time entries from Gottlieb and Hudson and their offices and their other lawyers and associates, it is apparent to me that Blake and Ryan are not very sophisticated in terms of knowing when they are being overcharged. Because while it could be possible that some of these things took this long, um some of it, it just keeps happening over and over and over again, right? Um now I also am guessing that Blake and Ryan are very demanding clients. And the more demanding your clients are, the more you have to talk to them and the more you have to work for them, which means the more that it costs them. Um, you know, there are plenty of lawyers who, and I used to work with a guy who was a great litigator, difficult to work with, but a great litigator. Um, and he would tell his clients, you know, when we were in a heavy period, whether it was trial prep or depositions or whatever, he would say, Listen, if you want me to focus only on your case for the next month, I'll do that. I'll have other people handle the other cases. But you need to understand that that means your every single minute of my day is going to be charged to you. And some clients who can pay that bill are like, that's what I want. I want you doing nothing but my case. I want you spending all of your time on me. Right? Um, and I I could see Blake and Ryan being those kind of clients. Um, you know, a lot of it is just unusual because I know I'm such a broken record here, but this was an employment case. It's not that complicated. Employment cases are not that complicated. Now it got more complicated when Wayfair filed a claim back because those were not employment claims, those were other types of civil claims. So that certainly complicated it more. But it didn't turn it into like securities fraud or something, or a class action suit, um, you know, where you've got 300 plaintiffs. It the pen, well, the what we like to say is uh the pen was heavy, right? Which means that they rounded up. If there was ever a question about, you know, what's what the were they at the beginning of the six-minute increment or the end, they were rounding up. Um, and it means they build every single minute, right? You're walking to Starbucks to get coffee thinking about deposition questions, you're charging them for it, which is not unethical, right? Um, but different, again, different lawyers have different lines and different firms have different lines. Um, with big institutional clients like banks or companies or places that have their own in-house counsel, that's when they really start to look at the bills. Like, we're not paying for that, and that's too much for that, and we're not paying for that research, and we're not right. And Blake and Ryan aren't those people, I don't think. At least not by the bills. They don't look like it. So, you know, it's hard for me to speak to any particular entry. It would be fair to say that they are charging probably the maximum number of hours in a day that could be reasonable before it starts to get suspicious. Like it, it's not suspicious if attorneys are billing 20 hours a day during trial. In fact, that's pretty realistic. Um, or 20 hours a day as you're leading up to like a big temporary injunction hearing or something like that. Like that does happen, but not for months and months and months on it. Right. Um, so I, you know, I saw Bocce say something like, what, you know, where does 13 hours in a day fall? That's that's not unheard of at a big national or international law firm for an associate to bill 13 hours in a day. Are they necessarily doing billable work every single minute of those 13 hours? I mean, you gotta go to the bathroom, right? But it is also not uncommon for folks like that to be in the office for 15 or 16 hours a day so that they can bill 13. Um, so you know, it's there's nothing that jumps off the page of me at like, that is just not reasonable. I remember one time, I can't remember how long ago this was, but most firms, um, when they set like a billable hour rate for associates, like you have to bill this many hours. And if you bill this many hours over this many hours, you get a bonus. It's usually around 2,000 hours a year or something like that. And I remember one time I heard a story from was like a friend of a friend who's had someone and they said they had billed 3,000 hours in a year. And I'm like, that's not possible. That's just, that's just not, someone has lied, right? So there are there are places where, like, oh, that can't possibly be true, but I haven't seen any of them yet. Um, that doesn't mean that Wayfarer can't push back on them and say that's an unreasonable amount of time. These are unreasonable charges. Remember that there's two components to it. It can be that the rate is unreasonable, it can also be that the number of hours is unreasonable. Um, I don't know that they'll challenge the rates because I'm guessing their rates are pretty similar. Um, I'm guessing that Friedman and Fritz and Shapiro have very similar rates. Um, but they can certainly challenge the amount of hours, and they can certainly challenge whether it was necessary to the case or not. I know the perjury uh entry has gotten a lot of play. Um, and the only thing I have to add to this conversation is I have researched perjury before. I have researched perjury when it came to witnesses. I have never researched perjury for my own client. I have had a client lie to me more than once, but you know, one that I caught it pretty early and let her know if you ever fucking lie to me again, we've got a real problem. And I want you to tell me the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and ended up being fine. Um, and so we don't know if they were actually concerned about perjury, but it it does kind of make sense that they filed a defamation claim. Wayfarer sued Blake Lively for defamation for what she told the New York Times. And what she told the New York Times was, here's the CRD complaint, right? So it makes sense that there was a legal issue of like, how does the litigation privilege and the source privilege and the uh fair report privilege intersect with perjury, right? Is there a way around the application of those privileges if something in her CRD complaint was a lie? And we don't know what the answer ultimately was to that because Wayfair didn't argue that. But I get it. I get that it's a hot topic to discuss. As a lawyer, discussing fees is like the most banal, boring shit there is. I will discuss it because people are interested in it, of course. But in terms of like reading through a fee document on my own time, it's not something I particularly want to do. I read legal bills all the time, and they're boring when I'm actually reading them to see if I should pay them, much less reading them in a case I'm not on. So I appreciate everybody doing the hard work there. Um, and I'll try to answer the big picture questions the best I can. I think we kind of have to wait to see what Wayfarer says um their arguments are going to be, because I have a feeling they're gonna hit it pretty hard. I have finally gotten through, I believe, all of the documents and attachments that were filed in opposition to Amy Griffin and Penguin Random House's motions to dismiss and anti-slap motions, motions to stop the case in its tracks. So this is the California case, the original case, where Jane Doe has sued Amy Griffin for invasion of privacy and some other claims, intentional infliction of emotional distress, um, for writing the tell about Amy's experiences when Jane Doe says that those experiences are actually her, and the woman in the book who goes by the pseudonym Claudia is actually Jane Doe. A lot of um drafts were submitted. It looks like they were exchanged in Discovery. Drafts of how Amy started writing about this, different versions of it. And, you know, I'm trying to be deferential to the writing process. As someone who's done some writing in my life, you know, you sometimes you conceptualize a story one way, and then you sit back and you're like, actually, I think this metaphor works better. I think this conceptualization works better, right? Um, but there are some differences between a 2022 draft and a 2023 draft that are pretty massive, that I think to me really give insight as to what the pathway might have been here as Amy Griffin was conceptualizing what this book was going to look like. So in March of 2022, Amy Griffin writes this kind of like short story called The Flow of Water. And in this story, she's telling uh the story of dealing with and coming to terms with childhood sexual abuse. But it has some real differences from the way the book ultimately turned out. The first is that instead of the metaphor being running, right, which is what it is in the tell, the metaphor is water. And it's about how she was a swimmer sometimes and how she likes to be near the the beach and she always likes to be near the water. Um, and so the different metaphor doesn't bother me all that much. I mean, you know, when you're trying to sort of figure out what's the best narrative device to tell a story, it's like, oh, it feels like running or it feels like swimming. Like, that doesn't really bother me in terms of it being different. What does stand out to me though, is that in the version of the story she tells in March 2022, there is no MDMA. And she has remembered all along. In the March 2022 draft, she is saying, I've always on some level known what happened. There are pieces of it she could always remember. She just couldn't deal with it. And in COVID in 2020, that was a time where she had a lot of alone time, right? She says, Me and my family left the city. Yeah, they like went to the Hamptons to some 11,000 square foot house or something. But in the 2022 version, she says, I've remembered vaguely all along, COVID came around. We were isolated, I was by myself a lot, I was swimming a lot, and I finally had the time to actually let myself fully remember and deal with what happened. In the 2022 version of the story, there was no MDMA. There was no high priestess of whatever. She knew all along and she helped herself remember the rest. That is a pretty big difference, right? Because if she wrote this in 2022, she would have done the MDMA in 2020. So she is actively choosing in 2022 not to include that part. Also, in the 2022 version, her kids ask if she is okay, if something has happened to her that she needs to tell them about, instead of the way that it shows up in the book, which is her kids saying, You're so distant, why aren't you here with us? And then she goes and figures out why that is. In the 2022 version, the kids go to her husband and say, What's wrong with mom? So in this earlier version, right, in 2022, water's the metaphor instead of running. She's remembered what happened on some level all along. There is no MDMA, and her kids are the ones who asked what was wrong after she'd already known some of these things, after she'd already started to figure out what all this meant. Then you get to 2023, and she's got an early proposal draft for the book, and that is when everything starts to change. In September of 2023, it becomes running as the metaphor, it becomes the medicine that draws out the memories, which is the MDMA, and we are first introduced to Claudia, this other person that this may have happened to. So somewhere between March of 2022 and September of 2023, the way she decided to tell this story changed pretty dramatically. And I honestly don't think that would matter at all if it weren't for the fact that it might be someone else's story. Right? If she were a normal author, and this is the part, this is one of the things that I think is wrong with her lawyer's version of their narrative. It's not that she changed the way that she told the story. If this case ultimately gets into discovery and Amy Griffin gets deposed, she's going to be deposed on all the ways this story changed. And I think her answer to most of those questions is going to be it's just the writing process. It's the creative process, right? You think of things differently, you change things differently. Um, maybe I didn't want to admit in 2022 that I'd done MDMA because I thought people would think I was weird. You know, she's probably gonna have answers for that. I and I think she's probably right in most circumstances. What makes this case different is one, she's claiming that it happened to her and it maybe actually happened to someone else. It's the fact that the story belongs to someone else that's the problem here. The the graviment of Jane Doe's claim is not the tell is a lie. The graviment of Jane Doe's claim is the tell is a lie because it's my story, right? So I think that's their number one problem. I think their number two problem is that this book would not have been published at all if it weren't Amy Griffin's story. If it were some person off the street who just cold called Penguin Random House and was like, hey, I have a story about sexual abuse and overcoming it. I work at the Whole Foods down the street, this book would not have been published. Right? So it's the high profile of the author, and it's the fact that it may actually contain elements from someone else's life. That's what makes it a big deal that she changed her story. And she did. She changed fundamental parts about how this happened, whether she knew it, whether she discovered it one day, whether it was MDMA that did it, how the kids play into it, all of that changed between March of 2022 and September of 2023. And I know most of you are following this as closely as I am, and you know how important 2023 is becoming. Because if all of this was going on, as Jane Doe says, and Dominique Price or whoever was getting information from her over the phone, and then she refused to sign her life rights away in early 2023, and Amy then goes to the other Claudia in 2023, and in September of 2023 starts writing the new version of the book. That is a timeline that matches up with Jane Doe's story a lot better than it matches up with Amy's. I've posted all this stuff on my Patreon, by the way. If you're on Patreon, you can read all these documents for yourself, and I'd love to know what you think. But I'm I've been really trying to isolate, like, yeah, we're gonna catch her in a bunch of inconsistencies because there's so many versions. And again, that in and of itself is not a legal problem. Is it a credibility problem? Sure. To the extent that the case might one day turn on Amy Griffin's testimony, does she have credibility problems? Uh yeah, she definitely does. But as a legal matter, I think it only really becomes material. Not because she may have jumped around in the way she told the story, but because the story wasn't hers to tell. That's what the case is about. There's also this side issue happening that I think we really have to keep our eye on. And that is this issue of who Claudia actually is. So from the beginning, right? That the book The Tell has a character, and that character's name is Claudia. Jane Doe says and has said from the beginning, I think that person is me. It contains a lot of things that match my life. Griffin's position from the beginning has been, that's not you, that's an entirely different person. And she has then produced text messages with this person, photos with this person, um, and alleged uh tellings of conversation with this person. So we know there is another human. And Amy says, that's the real Claudia. Right? And as some of you have noted, couldn't we solve a lot of this case if we just knew who that woman was? And I think the answer to that is yes. Right? Now we don't know what her motivations are. She might not want to get involved in this, she might feel duped. Maybe there's stuff that she has been through that we don't know. There could be all kinds of things there. But at this point in the case, nobody can make her come forward. But one of the things that is happening in this litigation, I think is really critical, and it could end up being the whole ballgame on the anti-slab motions. And that is who is this second Claudia? Jane Doe's legal team has sent discovery to Griffin's legal team saying, who is this woman? Tell us who she is, tell us her name. And Griffin's team will not provide that information, saying that's private, we're not. They haven't invoked any law. They're just like, no, we don't want to tell you. That invades her privacy. If I were Jane Doe's lawyers, I would get up at the hearing on the motions to dismiss and the anti-slap motions and say, how can this case possibly end before we've even had a chance to do discovery on who the person in the book actually is? Because that is the whole thing. If the person in the book is not Jane Doe, or partly Jane Doe, the case is over. The fact that Amy's lawyers are withholding that person's name. If I were Jane Doe's lawyers, I would be screaming from the hilltops. This case cannot end without us knowing who this woman is or having a chance to talk to her. At the very least. And I don't know how they're gonna do it because you can ask for discovery as part of anti-slap proceedings. You can say we need limited discovery just to look at the issues that have been raised in these motions. I don't think anybody's done that yet. But again, if I were Jane Doe's people, I would say, how can you possibly throw this case out? A case that is based on the idea that Claudia is Jane Doe. Right? If the whole case is I'm Claudia, and they say no, you're not, and we know who is, but we're not gonna tell you, I gotta say, that feels pretty unconstitutional to me. So I don't know if Jane Doe's people will take that tactic. I kind of hope they do, because there is absolutely no basis for them to deny them the second Claudia's name. I read their briefs. They have not provided any legal basis. They have not said, you know, it's a trade secret, it's a criminal investigation. None of those things apply. They just don't want to do it. They don't want to do it. And Amy Griffin's lawyers keep going to the judge and yelling about phone logs and how they have to, you know, image her phone to fully comply with the request for production and the interrogatories. And that's fine. But Jane Doe's lawyers need to be yelling back just as loud, if not louder. Who the fuck is Claudia? How dare you come to this court and ask for a case to be thrown out without even giving us the opportunity to Google the person that you say this book is really about? That's ridiculous. Now I'm gonna guess that Jane Doe might think she knows who that is, and they might have even tried to reach out to her. And who knows, maybe those conversations are ongoing. Um, someone's gonna have to talk to her eventually, right? To find out what the truth is here. But the fact that Amy's story changed so dramatically from 2022 to 2023, including but not limited to the edition of Claudia, tells me that that spring 2023 timeframe is the single most critical time frame in the entire case. Because it's allegedly when Jane Joe wouldn't sign over her life rights. It's allegedly when Amy Griffin decided to call this other woman and go visit her in Tennessee. It's allegedly when Amy Griffin got this postcard that we still haven't seen. And then right afterwards is when the story that ended up being the tell actually became that story. I want to know everything about that. I don't really have any updates for you in the Howard Stern NDA case. I still check it every couple of days. This is the case where a former office manager, an employee of Howard Stern, his show, and his wife has sued him, saying that three NDAs are unenforceable because she didn't actually sign them. Stern has responded and said, um, yes, you did, and they are enforceable, and you may not go out there and write a book about us or whatever she was planning to do. The case is mostly just sitting there, um, I think probably trying to decide if this is going to hearing or if the judge is going to decide it on the papers. I don't know how New York state courts like to do that kind of thing. The only thing that's popped on the docket, and I just thought it was worth mentioning, um, because it's rare in these big cases, is um Jane Doe's, not Jane Doe, Leslie Kuhn's attorney, the plaintiff's attorney, is a sole practitioner, meaning it's just him in his office. He might have a paralegal or something, but he's the only attorney in his office. And when you're the only attorney in your office and you go out of town, you have to tell the court in all of your cases that you're going out of town. Because you can't have, you don't have somebody to cover for you, right? When people work in these larger firms, as often happens with these bigger, more high-profile cases, it's just like, oh yeah, Jerry's gonna cover it for me. But Leslie Kuhn's lawyer is a sole practitioner. So he had to file something with the court saying, like, hey, yo, I'm gonna be on vacation for most of July. So please don't schedule hearings while I'm not here. And in state court, they'll probably say, okay, we'll wait until you get back, because things move slowly there anyway. But that has happened numbers and numbers of times in some of these bigger federal cases we've seen. It's just we don't know it because there are big enough firms where you just have someone cover it, right? Unless it's a trial where like the lead trial counsel has to be there. If you have more than a handful of lawyers in your firm, you just go on vacation and other people cover it for you. But I just kind of wanted to point out that, you know, her Leslie Kuhn's lawyer is a guy who it's just him. He practices all by himself. And so he has asked that nothing happen until he gets back from vacation. So hopefully nothing will. Just to sort of round out, are we even rounding out? I don't know. To sort of sum up and prepare for the next chapter on Brendan Sorsby, the one-man wrecking ball of college football and the NFL. Um, you know, there were all these lawsuits going around. His lawyer was like, we're gonna sue the NFL for not having a supplemental draft. Okay. They have agreed amongst themselves that he's not going to do that. So Soresby made an agreement with the NFL, like, all right, I won't sue you guys. I'll go into the 2027 draft. And they have said, you can go to non-NFL sponsored pre-draft events, and we won't get mad at you. So this is something of a detente. They've come to, you know, we won't bother you, you won't bother us. Everybody just wait until 2027. I believe there's news that he has signed with an XFL team in Texas. So he's just gonna like keep himself loose or whatever. But there is something else on the horizon where I think we're gonna see more litigation, or he's certainly going to need either the lawyers he's already used or he's gonna need more lawyers because that's what Soresby does. Um, it came out last week that unbeknownst to us, during this last spring training season, right? During spring camp of 2026, Paramount had a team taking, doing video of Texas Tech's football team. So, you know how they do like they go to a professional team and they video them and they like, you know, do a whole docuseries on what it's like for that team. Like, I think it started with hard knocks on HBO, like go to a team that's struggling. Well, Paramount apparently was putting together a series about Texas Tech, about the Raiders, because they were an up-and-coming team, right? And they had all this oil money behind them and all this kind of stuff. And so they had camera people and producers out there all spring. And we just found this out when Paramount put out a press release that said, Oh, by the way, we have all of this on tape. We are going to be releasing our season of this sometime later this year. Now, they did not mention his name. They just said, Hey, just so everybody knows, we've been filming and producing a docuseries about the Texas Tech football team for the last however many months. And of course, everybody's first reaction was, oh my God, do you have everything in there? Do you have it all? I mean, it would be documentary malpractice for them not to be covering the most important story, not only for that team, but in college football of the entire year. So my guess is that when this docuseries first started, that Sorsby and the coaches and the staff and all the other players signed some kind of release saying, Yeah, you can video me, yeah, you can edit me, I'm gonna be part of this, right? A talent release, as is typically signed for these things. But I'm also guessing that right now, Soresby and his agents and his managers are like, uh-oh. Because if they've got this guy on video acting entitled or uh unapologetic, or even if it just shows him in the throes of gambling in a way that makes him look bad, that could be a real problem for him trying to clean up his image. So I would not be surprised if there are lawyers talking to each other as we speak about what can Paramount show about the Soresby part of the Texas Tech documentary. Um, if I were Paramount, I'd probably be willing to go to court over that because everybody would watch it. Remember how I said a couple weeks ago, like, oh, it's a 30 for 30, it writes itself. But yeah, that would be 10 years from now. They can show this to us now. So I'm dying to know like what the release has said, how much control he has over his edit, if anything. If anyone does, it might not just be source, but it could be the coaches, it could be the AD, it could be the president of the university. So tuck that one back in the back of your head somewhere as a potential legal dispute because I can smell it coming. It's like inevitable. A very small update on the Idaho four parents lawsuit against Washington State University. They are starting to go into discovery in that case, um, which, you know, I hope some of that shows up on the docket so we can see it. But I did want to note that they have entered into a protective order in that case. For those of you who follow, you know, who followed other cases with me, you know that it's very common for parties to enter into a protective order before discovery starts to say, hey, there's some stuff that's going to come up in this case that we just want to make sure nobody puts on a public docket, whether it's private business information or medical information or something like that. Um, in this case, because the case is by the parents of the four students who were killed, and it is about Washington State and Coburger and their relationship, their protective order is very specific. And it says any information about the victims will not be made public unless it has already been made public. So they're probably going to have access to law enforcement records. They specifically said like autopsy photos, stuff like that. Anything that relates to those victims and anything that is graphic in nature. So I think a big part of this case is going to be what was Koberger's internet history, because there had always been talk that he was looking at some pretty violent stuff online. I think a lot of that stuff is going to fall under this protective order. And frankly, I think this is good. That stuff doesn't need to be on the public docket. We don't need to see all of that. I'm interested in seeing the emails internally with their behavioral assessment team and their counselors and their HR and their Title IX office about what they were doing about this guy. That's what I want to see. But just so you know, we are not going to get a backdoor into a bunch of graphic information about these victims or about these murders, which in my mind is a good thing. I don't think any of us need to see that. Finally, for civil disorder, I want to discuss and make you aware of a group of cases that are starting to settle, um, that were in the news a lot at the beginning, and then they kind of went underground, and now they're coming back up and being resolved. And they're really important cases in the First Amendment uh sphere. And so I want to make sure people are aware of what's going on. You may remember that after Charlie Kirk was killed in Utah, a lot of people went online and said all kinds of things about it. Good things, bad things, positive things, negative things, right? It was it was pretty explosive online, in part because Charlie Kirk had been a really online person. Um you may also remember that there was a pretty big push by a lot of politicians to punish people for things they were saying online about Charlie Kirk, particularly if those things were negative. And one of the subgroups that was targeted the hardest was teachers. K through 12 teachers, college professors, teachers of all kinds. And several different types of educators lost their jobs because of things that they put online about Charlie Kirk and about the murder of Charlie Kirk. And the people who were fired, if they were employees of public universities or public school systems, they have special rights, right? Because they work for the government. They work for a public entity. Um, and so they can sue and say, your firing me violated my First Amendment rights because you are the government and you're taking action against me based on my free speech. So several of those teachers and those professors sued the school districts and the universities and the colleges for violations of their civil rights. And a lot of those cases are starting to settle now. And the news about them settling is starting to come out, and they are getting pretty big numbers. Because these institutions are public, we know what the settlement amounts were. Because when you settle with a public entity, you can't make it confidential in most circumstances because all of these states have public records laws, and the citizens have the right to know what public money is being spent on, right? So if you sue a private university and settle, you can keep private how much they gave you. But if you sue a public university and settle, the public has the right to know how much that university spent settling that case with you because it's taxpayer money. So a bunch of stories are now starting to come out about the settlements from the lawsuits by these teachers and professors for engaging in online speech. And it's a really interesting pattern. So there's a they're getting multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, each of them, and sometimes even more than that. There is a K through 12 teacher in Georgia, um, who after Charlie Kirk died, she posted all she posted was uh his own quote, that famous quote he said about um. You know, school shootings are like the price we have to pay for freedom or something like that. She just posted that quote and nothing else. Um, when people came into her comments and said, you know, that's rude. She said, Oh, I wish him no ill will. This is a tragedy. You know, I wish he wouldn't have died, whatever. She got fired from her job. She's sued. She has just settled with that school district for $300,000. She will also get a positive reference for wherever she goes to find a job next. Um, that is, in my opinion, an appropriate finding. But let me keep going and then I'll sort of tell you what I think all of this means. In Tennessee, a professor at a public school posted, when Charlie Kirk died, posted a news article that cited that very quotation about, you know, shootings being whatever. He just didn't say, this is my commentary, just posted the news article was a couple of years old. Hey, here's a thing maybe we ought to think about. He was fired, he sued, he has settled for $500,000. Um, a professor in Indiana who, after Charlie Kirk's death, put on social media that, you know, his death is a tragedy, death is always a tragedy, but he was a person who sowed hatred and violence. That professor was fired, that professor sued. They have settled for $225,000. All of these comments were made on their private social media with no mention of the place that they worked, and all of them got fired for it, and now they are all getting paid. And I'm gonna tell you in legal ease why that is. But all of these people exercised their right to use the civil courts to say, you can't shut down my free speech just because I work for a public institution. And the fact that they are settling is of course not an admission of liability on any of these schools. But these schools do not want to go to trial on this. They are settling one after the other, after the other, after the other. Um there's one big big case, in fact, the biggest case, which is from a professor who after Charlie Kirk died, called him a psycho, a violent psycho, said his wife was a sick fuck for marrying him. She was the one who went the hardest. She was fired, she sued, she has settled for $1.9 million dollars. So of all of the cases I just told you about, I told you about four. Three of them were people saying pretty mild things or posting his own quotes on their private accounts, and they got a couple of hundred thousand dollars when they lost their jobs. So, why is the person who actually said maybe not you know fireable, but but pretty caustic stuff, getting the most money? This is a civil court. How do you determine damages? You determine damages in large part by injury and suffering, including emotional damage. When your civil rights are violated, part of your damage is emotional, right? Because you can't you can't trust the government, you can't work. The reason this woman got so much money is because she received so many death threats. Because after she put that stuff on social media, I think it was just in a comment. It wasn't even her post, it was in a comment to someone else's post. It was then made to go viral by politicians and right-wing activists, and she had people calling for her death. And because she had people calling for her death, she racked up a lot more damages. So, what's the lesson here for everyone involved? I think the lesson here for employers is you can follow what politicians want you to do. But the law is still the law on the First Amendment. Every single one of these cases, there were politicians who were calling up university and school administrators and saying, I am putting my power behind this, and I want you to take action. And those administrators in all those schools took action, and every single one of them got sued, and every single one of them had to pay to make it go away. So the politicians told the administrators to do something that was ultimately going to end up creating real civil liability. We don't know how many times that happened and people said no. But I can tell you, as someone who has worked in higher education, that that kind of thing happens all the time. So I think that the lesson here for public universities and colleges and school boards is you're gonna be left holding the back if you do what these people say. And yeah, maybe they'll fire you if you don't fire the people they want. The only person who's gonna lose in this circumstance is the person in the middle. Politician doesn't care. They still have their job. The employee is gonna sue and get a huge settlement. And the administrator in the middle is the one who's gonna be left holding the back in every possible way. So it's a little bit of a tale about be careful what you say okay to. Because not only are you gonna be the one who makes the mess, you're gonna be the one who cleans it up. In terms of employees, I think one of the lessons here is you still have First Amendment rights, the court recognizes them, even if sometimes politicians don't. Because as I'll discuss in Legal Ease, these were all on private social media accounts about private matters that did not pertain to their job duties. These are protected things. And even though the politicians who might lean on the schools and the administrators and the donors don't think they're protected, the courts know that they are. So to me, this is a little bit of a uh vindication for the court system. And these are in very red states. Well, Georgia's kind of purple these days, but we're talking about Tennessee and Indiana, right? That's where the politicians said, how dare people talk poorly about Charlie Kirk. I want them fired. Well, they did the firing, and now they're having to pay. Last but not least, just to keep it on the top of your brain, is Karen Reed. We have, you know, four cases in the Karen Reed multiverse at this point. Um, there's a lot of day-to-day coverage of the wrongful death case because we're deep into discovery there and they're having arguments in front of this judge like every 20 minutes. None of them ever really seem to go anywhere, if you ask me. But last week, the judge called everybody in, every single lawyer for every single client, except for two, I think, that had other things, and gave them a speech about leaks. Because there had been an allegation that I guess some information was put on the docket under seal about Proctor trying to get out of his deposition. Apparently, it was medical information. And it somehow ended up on Twitter. And the judge was convinced that it had to have been one of the lawyers who did it. And so he called them all in and he gave him this big speech about leaks and said, you know, and he read from a piece of paper, which I that's just so bush league for a judge. You should be able to speak off the cuff. Come on now. Um, and just said, you know, we're not gonna do this, and we all have our ethical responsibilities. And I'd like you guys to go get together and come up with a protective order between yourselves that I'm willing to sign that says how we're gonna protect this kind of information. Um, and if you don't, I'm gonna do it. And it was a brushback pitch. I know what he was trying to do, but I felt like it was really limp. If I were that judge, I would have been like, now listen, fuckers. I don't know if any of you did this or not, but let me be incredibly clear. And he just doesn't, this judge doesn't speak with authority. And that bothers me. Now, I don't know if we'll get to a point where he will. You don't have to be an asshole, right? But you have to make it clear that you command the room. And I just don't feel like this judge commands the room. So I'm still watching that, you know, every time there's a hearing in that case, there are folks on YouTube who go through the whole. I just usually don't think it's very interesting, but I will cover the stuff when I do and just know that I'm watching it and paying attention to it. The one that I'm really watching, and I'm gonna start talking to you guys about again, is the federal case, because there is a hearing in the federal case. This is the case where Karen Reed has sued the Alberts, the McCabes, Higgins, Tully, Buchanan, and Proctor in federal court for violations of her civil rights. There is a hearing next week on the motions to dismiss. That is a do-or-die day for Karen Reed. Because if those motions are granted, that case goes away. Um, and that is the only case where she is directly uh suing the McCabe's, the Alberts, and Brian Higgins. So I'm gonna start reminding everybody about that because that one is, you know, as interesting as the discovery fights are in the wrongful death case, they are nowhere near as important as that hearing is going to be. And finally, for legal ease, we're gonna keep talking about the First Amendment in teachers because this is one of those things that I think a lot of people don't understand fully. Um, and I think they should. So I'm gonna pull all the way back to First Amendment principles, which I think people understand at this point, I would hope, or the people who want to understand do, which is that the First Amendment's right to free speech is a limitation on the government and the government only. The First Amendment says that the government cannot inhibit free speech, the government cannot restrain free speech, the government cannot take action against you because you engaged in free speech. Um, so if you have a private employer, that doesn't apply to them. With a private employer, if they don't like something that you have said, if they don't like a statement you have made, political or otherwise, and they fire you, that is completely within their rights, unless it falls into some other category, like it's discrimination because they only did it to the people in a certain group, because it's retaliation for some other protected activity, like you're a whistleblower or something like that. But like the cases I was telling you about with the teachers who were fired for saying these things on their own private social media, and then they sued and they got money. If they had worked for private schools or private colleges, they would not have been able to bring those lawsuits. Because only the government is prohibited from doing that to you. Private actors can discriminate based on speech as much as they want. It's important for employees to know that if you work for Joe's Widget Factory and you make a post on your social media that says, you know, fuck Kamala Harris. And Joe's Widget Factory is like, we really like Kamala Harris around here. You can't say that. They have the legal right to fire you for that. But if you work at Joe's publicly funded university, they can't because they're the government. And so they have a responsibility above and beyond a private employer to not step all over people's First Amendment rights. I think people generally understand like what is considered the government, right? I'm making air quotes if you're listening to this. Like, you know, the federal government and the State Department and the state government, and what counties and cities and right, these are all government. But there's more things to government than just things you think about as being government. And the biggest pocket is publicly funded schools, which is a lot of schools. It's every school district in the country, it's every state university, it's every, you know, blah blah blah state. Anything that is funded by the government in education is considered to be the government. So all of these cases I was telling you about arise from people who were working for public schools, either public K-12 schools or public universities or public colleges. And so when someone tried to fire them for engaging in free speech, that was the government firing them for engaging in free speech. And that you cannot do. To say, you know what, the public doesn't like that we have somebody here who says whatever that is. So let's just fire them. They have essentially no liability there. But for a public employer, they have tons of liability because they are the government and they are not allowed to make hiring and personnel decisions based on people engaging in free speech. And so this has become a really big issue in schools over the last 10 or so years. And as those cases I was telling you about have shown, teachers and professors are winning. Because, again, regardless of what the politicians want, the law is what it is, which is that if you are a branch of the government, if you're the university of whatever, and you're a branch of the government, you cannot use that power to say you can't teach history anymore because I don't like what you said about the Revolutionary War. A private employer could, but a public one can't. Um, there's also this idea of academic freedom, which I think is greatly misunderstood because I'm not even sure the law really understands what it is. It's sort of like an offshoot of the First Amendment, but it's also its own idea. Um, and I think some people believe that academic freedom means that teachers and professors can say whatever they want. And that's just not true. They can't say whatever they want. I have seen and I have been part of many professors and faculty members losing their jobs over things that they said. Um, but what academic freedom does is it protects the right to discuss controversial topics for purposes of learning, right? So academic freedom says you have the right to discuss the topic, to be like, well, have you thought about this? Well, have you thought about that, right? So if somebody says, why don't we try to make the argument, what if we just engage in the intellectual activity of slavery was a good thing? That doesn't mean that that teacher believes that slavery was a good thing. It means they are trying to stimulate the minds of the students to sort of analyze and do critical thinking about what slavery was about. That's what academic freedom protects. Academic freedom does not protect people going into the classroom and being like, here's who you should vote for. That's not academic freedom. So I might want to do a longer video on this at some point because it's a really rich topic, but I'm feeling really positive about the fact that all of these cases are getting settled one after the other. Because when this was happening, when teachers and faculty were being fired for things they said on their private accounts about their own personal feelings, most of which were not even derogatory. It was just like, this is what the guy said. I knew that that was a violation of the First Amendment. It was just a matter of was anybody going to sue over it, hold them accountable. And that's exactly what they're doing. And even if you are a person who agrees that they should have been fired, or you were a really big fan of Charlie Kirk and you did not like the way the internet was talking about him, I would posit to you that you want that speech to be protected because that means that the opposite is also protected. If it's protected speech to say, you know, that guy thought that gun rights were okay, that means it is also protected speech to say, he was my hero, we should name all the roads after him, which is another thing people were saying. And that's the great thing about speech, is it protects everything regardless of the content. That's what it's supposed to do, right? The government is not supposed to be allowed to take action about your speech based on its content, based on what it's about. They can take action based on where and when and how you do it, but not what you say. And so, in my opinion, a win for the First Amendment is a win for every viewpoint, because that is the whole point. That was a lot and very random. I feel like this week was very random. But you know, some weeks are like that. Um, anyway, thanks for joining me on Wednesday. And uh next week, come back also on Wednesday because the drama never stops and someone has to make it make sense.