Lawsuit of the Day: This ACORN Stuff is Nuts

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is fighting back thanks to Maryland’s “Linda Tripp Law.”
For those of you that have been living under a rock, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute to dupe ACORN employees. The two shot hidden camera footage that showed two (former) ACORN employees giving tax advice on how to run a brothel to the unsavory couple.
ACORN and their former workers are suing O’Keefe, Giles, and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart – who posted the video on his website — under Maryland’s wiretapping laws. The law states that both parties must consent to an audio recording, and was used to indict Linda Tripp during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.
ACORN is seeking a lot of money in this lawsuit. Hey, now that Congress has cut off their funding the money has to come from somewhere. The AP reports:

The lawsuit claims the video damaged ACORN’s reputation and asks for injunctions barring its further broadcast or distribution. It seeks $2 million in compensatory damages — $1 million for ACORN and $500,000 for each of the two former employees — as well as $1 million in punitive damages from each of the three defendants.

As one tipster put it:

I read the basis for the law suit and vomited a little in my mouth.

It’s not that O’Keefe and Giles have clean hands here, but the “optics” of this lawsuit are pretty bad for ACORN. Let’s look at this in more detail after the jump.


Some commentators have hailed O’Keefe and Giles as heroes of modern journalism. That is probably going a bit too far. Over at True/Slant, Laurie Essig makes the point that O’Keefe and Giles are more akin to Borat than Bernstein. A professional journalist would arguably have a deeper understanding of Maryland’s law against secret recordings.
In response to the lawsuit, O’Keefe has responded as a layperson, not as a journalist or as a person who has received the advice of counsel:

“It’s not in their interest to attack me and Hannah,” O’Keefe told Fox News. “If they want to equate sex trafficking of young girls with videotaping someone without their consent, that’s their moral prerogative, but that just shows you how low they are.”

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Somebody should tell O’Keefe that we have laws against sex trafficking and illegal recordings. It’s a pretty big government.
But one imagines that a dirty, rabid squirrel would have a better strategy for winning in the court of public opinion than ACORN has shown:

Andrew D. Freeman — an attorney for ACORN, Thompson and Williams — said the former employees did not wish to comment but that the emotional distress claim “is not an exaggeration.”
“They’re doing their best not to watch television. They’ve sort of been prisoners in their own homes,” Freeman said. “While everyone, including them, agrees that some of the things they said were dumb, in Maryland we have a right to say dumb things in the privacy of our homes and offices without fear of being taped and without fear of being splashed all over the Internet.”

Were people in a coma during the late nineties? Tripp was indicted, but she wasn’t prosecuted for recording Lewinsky. It just looks bad to sue someone for accurately recording what you said. And there’s s a big difference between saying “dumb” things and counseling Superfly about how to set up a tax free house of prostitution. Does ACORN not know that they are in a political fight here? The right wing is coming after them, the left wing has abandoned them, moderates just want them to go away, and ACORN is coming back with: we can’t watch television?
There is a legally cognizable cause of action here. It’s just really, really dumb.
APNewsBreak: ACORN Sues Filmmakers [Maryland AP News]
Hey all you ACORN nuts. Here’s another squirrely story. [True/Slant]

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