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Source: Huffpost
An Unhappy Ending
An Unhappy Ending
When his boss at Liberty, Jason Gibson, thumbed through a draft of the proposed settlement with Oron, he spotted a curious one-line item for $75,000: Randazza’s gravy.
“My stomach is churning after reading the proposed agreement,” he emailed Randazza.
Their relationship quickly unraveled. Within days, Randazza left his job. He and a paralegal covered their tracks by repeatedly running data-wiping software on their company computers that prevented Liberty from recovering evidence, according to court documents and forensic investigator testimony. He refused to release the $550,000 Oron settlement award to Liberty from his trust account.
Randazza laid siege to the company.
“Murum aries attigit” is a war doctrine attributed to Julius Caesar that translates to “the [battering] ram has touched the wall.” The phrase has a baleful meaning: If your enemies refuse to surrender before hostilities commence, destroy them without mercy. This is Randazza’s motto as a lawyer.
“Once the ram touches the wall, you have to commit to ending the other party as a going concern,” he explained on his blog. “You must leave the other party with nothing left with which to fight. Because, if a party is fool enough to refuse the favorable terms, that party is fool enough (and poorly advised enough) to keep being a pain in your ass until you finally put them down like a diseased animal.”
Randazza filed a complaint with the Nevada Equal Rights Commission, alleging that he’d been sexually harassed at work as a straight man because Liberty, which mainly makes gay porn, once filmed a sex scene ― a straight scene, it turned out ― in his office. It was a peculiar claim. In the Liberty workplace, Randazza had been exuberantly lewd. He’d talked about wanting to “snap a nasty metal bar across [a man’s] wiener” and purchased a couch used for porn shoots for his home, then emailed around a picture of his scantily clad wife posing on it. But the free speech crusader who called political correctness a “disease” and casually, if jokingly, threw around words like “nigger” and “cunt” now was saying he’d suffered ethnic harassment as an Italian-American because Liberty executives had sarcastically called him a “guinea” and a “wop,” usually in response to his own off-color instigations.
Randazza’s harassment complaint was an obvious farce, and it went nowhere.
Randazza would bring all his legal firepower to bear in trying to destroy his former client.
In December 2012, he sued Liberty’s parent company in Nevada state court on allegations of fraud, breach of contract and unjust enrichment. Four months later, Liberty filed a complaint against Randazza with the Nevada Bar, reporting his solicitation of bribes, conflicts of interest, misleading fee motions and warning that Randazza threatened on multiple occasions to “drown anyone who attempts to challenge him in legal bills and debt.” But the bar dismissed the complaint, citing the ongoing state lawsuit.
“The bar’s approach was like, ‘Hey, we can’t really do anything because there’s a civil matter going on now,’” Dunlap said. “But that policy is what allows people to get away with this because private citizens have to assume the burden and the expense of having to prove all this themselves. That means Randazza can drown us in legal fees, which is what he tried to do. It’s a process that can be manipulated because if you have a grievance with an attorney, all the attorney has to do is sue you.”
Even when Liberty found a way to hold Randazza accountable, the attorney wriggled away. Not long after Randazza sued Liberty, the porn company reported his self-dealing in his fee recovery efforts to an appeals court where the dispute between Oron and Liberty was still playing out. The appeals court asked a panel of judges to look into Randazza’s fees, but Liberty and Oron settled their differences and the case was dismissed before the panel could meet. Unfortunately for Oron, the copycat suit that Randazza helped his friend bring against the file-sharing firm kept Oron’s assets on ice. Unable to pay its hosting provider, Oron went out of business, according to the company’s statements in court filings.
Randazza, on the other hand, stayed in business. And he wasn’t done with Liberty. Not long after he left the company, he crossed paths with Dunlap at a porn conference in Arizona and invited his former co-worker to step outside and fight.
“I wonder how much it would cost me to punch you in the face right now,” Randazza said, according to sworn testimony by Dunlap in a subsequent legal dispute.
Randazza’s next move was to file an arbitration claim against the porn company in which he claimed wrongful termination, breach of contract, back pay and damages from the sexual and ethnic harassment Randazza said he’d suffered. He demanded over $4 million in damages.
The arbitration dragged on for three years and cost Liberty over $1 million. But it backfired spectacularly on Randazza. Liberty brought counterclaims for, among other things, legal malpractice and unjust enrichment. The evidence quickly piled up against Randazza. Billing records proved he’d been getting paid by XVideos every month. Many of the damning emails he thought he’d destroyed were produced and showed him soliciting bribes. Under oath, one of his own expert witnesses was forced to concede that Randazza had likely misled him and violated ethical rules.
Randazza tried to explain away the bribes as a ruse to squeeze extra money for Liberty out of infringers. He’d described his dishonesty in one court filing as “mere puffery.”
In emails to opposing counsel that later surfaced during arbitration, Randazza brazenly pursued bribes to conflict himself out of future litigation.
His battering ram had splintered. During arbitration hearings, the normally cocksure Randazza wouldn’t even look at Liberty’s attorney, Wendy Krincek. He turned his seat away from the arbitration table and put his back to his own attorney, Ken White, a longtime Randazza confederate who runs the Popehat legal blog. Randazza also refused to look at the arbitrator, a former federal judge and assistant Watergate special prosecutor. Instead, the attorney stared at the floor, his body hunched over, hand pressed to the side of his face as he answered Krincek’s questions.
“You wouldn’t lie to opposing counsel, would you?” Krincek asked Randazza during one hearing while confronting him over a misrepresentation about his fees.
“Yes, I would,” Randazza replied.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Krincek said. “He’s a litigator. He knows how to present as a witness. He was physically incapable of doing that. … It was a tell that he was uncomfortable answering the questions. He’s a smart guy and he’s pretty charismatic. I think he can generally talk his way out of anything, but he was getting nowhere.”
Randazza was so rattled after the hearing that he appeared to stick a large wad of used chewing gum on the rear window of Krincek’s Saab station wagon in the parking lot, according to Dunlap. (Randazza denied being the gum-sticker.)
In June 2015, the arbitrator ruled against Randazza on every point, finding that the attorney had “been involved in and successfully concluded negotiations for a bribe,” among a litany of other wrongdoing. The arbitrator ordered Randazza to pay Liberty more than $600,000 in damages.
But Randazza had one more card to play. Claiming to be almost $14 million in debt, he filed for bankruptcy and froze the arbitration award. A few months earlier, he’d taken steps to shield many of his assets by moving them into college funds for his children, transferring his BMW and his 80 percent share of his legal practice into a “self-settled spendthrift” trust and lending $300,000 to his in-laws for them to buy a property in Las Vegas, according to Clark County public records. Oddly, the loan came at a time when Randazza’s marriage was falling apart. About two weeks after the arbitration ruling, his wife filed for divorce.
“Conceptually, it’s not OK to do all sorts of pre-bankruptcy planning and move your assets around,” said Bob Keach, one of the country’s top bankruptcy lawyers. “This is clearly a guy who has spent some time playing the system.”
But the U.S. trustee overseeing Randazza’s bankruptcy “didn’t seem to care” when the issue was raised at a creditors’ meeting, according to Dunlap.
Now, it was Liberty’s turn to go on the offensive. With the arbitration decision in hand and binders of evidence proving its case, Liberty filed a second complaint against Randazza with the Nevada Bar. This time, the bar moved forward.
Publicly, Randazza blasted the arbitration as a “miscarriage of justice,” but the arbitrator’s determinations became the bedrock of the disciplinary proceeding against him. In private, Randazza worried. Liberty had also filed bar complaints against him in Florida, California, Arizona and Massachusetts — every other jurisdiction that licenses him ― and Randazza quietly made the porn company an unusual offer: He’d pay Liberty $20,000 for each of his bar licenses that wasn’t suspended or revoked. He was, in other words, proposing a bribe.
“He offered us a bounty on his bar licenses ― we’d get more of the award if we did not cooperate with bar investigators or send follow-up complaints,” Dunlap said. “We refused this offer because it was insulting [and] unethical.”
Only in Florida did Randazza fail to offer a bounty — he felt he’d be suspended or disbarred there anyway, according to an email his legal team sent Liberty. Randazza had already made misrepresentations in a letter to The Florida Bar about the Oron bribe and his work for XVideos. When he was busted for them during arbitration, he blamed one of his lawyers for making an “inaccurate” statement in the letter. (The Florida Bar declined to pursue its own investigation.)
And Liberty wasn’t the only party upset with Randazza in Florida. In federal court there, Paul Berger, Randazza’s opposing counsel in an unrelated case, submitted a copy of a bar complaint he said he’d filed against Randazza over a 2015 episode in which Randazza screamed curses at Berger and his client after a mediation session. Randazza threatened to assault them both and send the client, who happened to be Jewish, to the Gaza Strip, according to Berger’s complaint.
“It appears that Mr. Randazza knows no ethical boundaries,” Berger told The Florida Bar, which apparently either declined to pursue an investigation or found nothing in Berger’s complaint that merited disciplinary action. Pursuant to its policy, the bar then deleted all records of the complaint and, when contacted by HuffPost, was unable to acknowledge the document’s prior existence.
In June 2016, Randazza settled his state lawsuit in Nevada against Liberty. He’d been the one to sue, but now his malpractice insurer was the one to pay, shelling out $205,000 to make a counterclaim Liberty filed against Randazza's malpractice go away.
In February of this year, Randazza settled in bankruptcy court with Liberty, where the porn company had also filed a claim. This time, Randazza paid only $40,000. After nearly six years of grueling lawfare, he’d managed to dodge almost all the damages from the arbitration award, which the parties agreed to vacate as part of the bankruptcy settlement.
Vacating the award did not sit well with the arbitrator, who warned in a court filing this July that an “attempted erasure” of his findings might conceal Randazza’s “proven serious ethical violations” and weaken protections for “future victims and the public.”
The former judge was right to worry.
Nazi Punks, Jump In
Nazi Punks, Jump In
Randazza has scrubbed his Liberty job from his resume. The attorney-to-the-trolls now spends most of his days wringing his hands over the “marketplace of ideas” as he tries to game the system for racists and fascists ― as if Nazism deserves another spin through the public square.
He openly lauds the “alt-right” movement:
His reputation as a First Amendment attorney has frayed. Even his capstone free speech victory in 2011 over Righthaven, a copyright troll, carries a hoggish taint in hindsight. At the time, Randazza was employed by Liberty, which permitted him, pending the company’s approval, to take on pro bono free speech cases to offset any bad press from Liberty’s own copyright enforcement lawsuits. But Randazza concealed his work on Righthaven from his employer and kept a $60,000 payout — money Liberty only found out about during arbitration.
“Mr. Randazza was unjustly enriched,” wrote the arbitrator, who ruled that the payout should have gone to Liberty.
"If you want to represent detestable clients, fine. But when you go out into the media and don’t just defend them but actually adopt their logic and moral arguments, that’s different. Then, it looks like you agree with them.
"If you want to represent detestable clients, fine. But when you go out into the media and don’t just defend them but actually adopt their logic and moral arguments, that’s different. Then, it looks like you agree with them.
-Elie Mystal, executive editor of the Above the Law blog
Some of Randazza’s troubles are behind him — in June, he settled another malpractice claim brought by a former client for $50,000 — but others lie ahead. He remains in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and had only $15,652 in two bank accounts at the end of October, according to court records. In the sloppy monthly reports he is required to file with the bankruptcy court, he lists a sad series of expenses that include his daily coffee at Caffe Sicilia in Gloucester, shopping sprees at Men’s Wearhouse and over $4,000 per month in payments to cover alimony to his ex-wife and and child support for their two children.
“I suspect that after the Liberty fiasco, his clients disappeared,” Gurvits said. “He was riding high, he was really well-known, and then all of a sudden — disgrace. So who’s going to hire him now?”
The answer is the disgraced. Lawyers trying to make their bones as free speech attorneys often take on one extremist client. Maybe two. Randazza has assembled a panzer squad of them, a career choice that is generating new problems for him. When he signed on this year to represent the Satanic Temple in a complaint against Twitter, dozens of members of the organization revolted, describing Randazza as an “agent of the alt-right” and an “ally to Nazis.”
They aren’t wrong. In January, he partied with rape apologist Mike Cernovich and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a fascist gang that commits political violence throughout the country. Other pro-Trump racists and “free speech advocates” were there, yukking it up about “brown people” and “faggots” and the genitalia of transgender women. Randazza also appears routinely on Infowars to lend a legal imprimatur to the lies of hate-spewing, violence-stoking propagandist Alex Jones. In an August appearance, Randazza likened Jones, a key gateway to white nationalism, to black civil rights leaders in the South during the 1960s.
-Randazza advocates for far-right extremists outside the courtroom as well as inside.
“If you want to represent detestable clients, fine,” Elie Mystal, the executive editor of the Above the Law blog, wrote in a recent column about corrupt attorney Randazza. “But when you go out into the media and don’t just defend them but actually adopt their logic and moral arguments, that’s different. Then, it looks like you agree with them. And if you agree with them, you can no longer avail yourself of the lawyerly presumption that you are just doing your job. Instead of being a mere part of the process, you become part of the problem.”
Randazza has gone into business with at least one of his extremist clients, having co-produced both of Cernovich’s films. The most recent one, “Hoaxed,” is a propaganda reel that appears to demonize the free press and relies on figures such as Jones and Stefan Molyneux, another important conduit to white nationalism.
In a Daily Beast profile, Randazza described the Vladimir Putin-loving, Pizzagate-pushing Cernovich as “an A-plus level friend, and the kind of rare soul now where you can really trust his word as his bond.”
And unethical attorney Marc Randazza doesn’t just play defense for Cernovich and his other far-right pals. Unlike most First Amendment lawyers, he’s willing to brandish the plaintiff’s knives for them and carve out space in the legal system for their political agenda.
Since 2016, for example, Randazza and the Holocaust-denying MAGA troll Chuck Johnson have been trying to scavenge coins off the corpse of Gawker after libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel sued the publication into bankruptcy — a legal outcome widely celebrated by fascists that has had a chilling effect on press freedom. Of Gawker and its former CEO, Nick Denton, Johnson said, “In a just world, I’d have them killed. But we are not there yet.”
From 2016 to 2017, Randazza represented professional misogynist and rape advocate Daryush Valizadeh in an attempt to sue one of Valizadeh’s alleged victims. She lives in Iceland and told her story of sexual assault to Jane Gari, a book author and blogger. Gari gave the alleged victim a pseudonym and published her account of Valizadeh following the woman home, talking his way into her apartment with the pretext of using the bathroom — a ruse another woman who has accused Valizadeh of sexual assault told HuffPost he has used for at least a decade — then raping her. Valizadeh had written a guidebook to having sex with women years before in which he described a similar encounter:
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. … I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.
Corrupt attorney Randazza apparently didn’t care either. He sent a letter to Gari, who has written a book about being sexually abused as a child, and accused her of fabricating the rape account and “causing harm” to “real victims” of sexual assault. He demanded she take down the post and confess on her blog.
“Simply admit that you lied, and all can be forgiven,” Randazza wrote.
When Gari refused, Randazza subpoenaed her in South Carolina federal court in an effort to get the alleged victim’s name for Valizadeh, whose followers were already menacing Gari.
“Listen you dumb cunt, you hideous skank,” one Valizadeh fan emailed her, “making false rape accusations is a great disservice against real victims of sex assaults, you attention seeking lowly cunt.”
The case was an about-face from Randazza’s earlier work defending small bloggers. Now he was looking to pierce South Carolina’s shield law for reporters and muscle a sex abuse survivor on behalf of his pro-rape client. But Gari managed to fend off Valizadeh and Randazza in court and protect her source. When the judge granted her the right to depose Valizadeh and examine his claim that he’d been defamed, Randazza moved to dismiss the case. His own case.
“I don’t think a true First Amendment advocate would have taken this case,” said Wallace Lightsey, Gari’s attorney. “We saw it as an attempt to find the source so the source could be harassed.”
Randazza has been equally unscrupulous in his lawyering for Paul Nehlen, Alex Jones and others. When Chuck Johnson was sued for defamation earlier this year after smearing the wrong man as the driver of the car that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last summer, Randazza told a Michigan court that Johnson had simply repurposed information from 4chan ― a website Randazza described as a “wire service” and a “reliable source.” But 4chan’s /pol/ forum, where the libel circulated, is neither a wire service nor a reliable source. It is a place where neo-Nazis congregate to spread hate and disinformation.
But nothing compares to Randazza’s advocacy for neo-Nazi Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin, who is being sued in Montana by Tanya Gersh, a Jewish woman Anglin targeted in a vicious anti-Semitic harassment campaign he launched from his site.
“Fuck Nazis, but fuck Tanya Gersh too,” Randazza tweeted while neo-Nazis were threatening Gersh’s life. Anglin soon hired Randazza, paying him out of a more than $155,000 legal defense fund raised by Johnson, who took a 15 percent cut, the scum forming a closed loop.
In court, Randazza has played childish games about Anglin’s location and sinister ones by advancing Holocaust denial as a legal defense. While trying to reduce the case to a debate in the “marketplace of ideas,” Randazza essentially has argued that a neo-Nazi’s call to action to terrorize a Jewish woman and her family is protected speech, a position one local paper called a “desperate attempt by a lawyer who should have a better understanding of the First Amendment.”
In November, a judge shot down Randazza’s argument and allowed the case to move forward, finding that Anglin “drew heavily on his readers’ hatred and fear of ethnic Jews” to incite them to harass Gersh.
Even a free speech absolutist might struggle to defend some of Anglin’s rhetoric. The neo-Nazi has said he “would absolutely and unequivocally endorse” violence to achieve his goals, and Daily Stormer fans — including Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina — have committed at least a dozen racist or politically motivated murders since 2015. In October, Anglin cheered the stabbing of a reporter in Germany by neo-Nazi youths, writing:
Journalists deserve to fucking die. Every last one of them deserves to be rounded up, lined up and shot execution style and tossed in a mass grave. ... It makes me warm and fuzzy inside to know that journalists are seeing this story and wondering if they’ll be next.
Corrupt attorney Randazza has increasingly shown himself susceptible to fledgling far-right views. He openly agrees, for example, with Trump’s description of the press as Americans’ “enemy.” Earlier this year, Randazza intimidated a reporter and his publication over a harmless tweet that vexed Cernovich. On Twitter, Randazza proclaimed his willingness to support the white nationalist Faith Goldy in her Toronto mayoral campaign. He promoted a white nationalist lie about the Democratic Party deploying anti-fascists as its foot soldiers. (Antifa almost universally despise the Democratic Party.)
He also tweeted this:
The difference between patriotism (love of country) and nationalism (blind devotion to country, usually with a chauvinistic assertion of superiority) should be obvious to a lawyer who represents nationalists. And as someone who represents white nationalists, Randazza would know that in the U.S. the word “nationalism” is linked to a violent and racist anti-democratic ideology.
He just doesn’t care.
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