For most lawyers, responding to a cease and desist letter is an exercise in draft after draft of incremental editing until, “go piss up a rope, you ambulance chasing shitbird” reads more like, “in consideration of the record and relevant caselaw, we respectfully decline.”
Marc Randazza doesn’t do the last part. If anything, his meticulous editing ratchets up the creativity. Living out that unfiltered expression is an overlooked perk of a free speech practice. It’s also a useful marketing strategy because if you’re the kind of person facing a weapons-grade stupid legal threat, this is the sort of response that makes you say, “Yes, that’s my guy.”
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Enter @murrayhillguy1. When his prospective date asked a question about politics, he called off the date and posted the text conversation online. The woman involved didn’t appreciate their conversation becoming social media fodder and lawyered up, commissioning some poor soul to draft a takedown letter dictated between deep sighs and furtive glances at the retainer check.
We serve as First Amendment counsel to the owner of the X account @murrayhillguy.
Your client, Julia agreed to a date with my client. She then asked him if he voted for Zohran Mamdani, (implying that it mattered in the context of the date) and my client’s response was to cancel the date and to post the exchange on his social media account. A few people laughed. That should have been the end of it.
To be fair, that does matter in the context of a date. Since the other viable alternative was a guy forced out of his last job over sexual harassment running on a platform of “yeah, but who cares?” it seems entirely reasonable if a woman wanted to make sure she wasn’t committing to a night of having to watch her drink from her own date. Because New York employs the much-more-rational ranked choice system, she’s not even asking if Mamdani was the guy’s first choice — the whole race was “do you not rank Cuomo or not rank Mamdani” so she’s very much asking if her date was the sort of guy who might say, Jordan Peterson has a lot of good ideas.
But on the more fundamental point, yes, this should have been the end of it.
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Friends, it was not the end of it. Instead, the letter claims she suggested that she would “call the police” before ultimately hiring a lawyer to send a demand letter. The letter didn’t quite accuse anyone of defamation — because it couldn’t really — but it apparently tried to radiate vague menace about “certain representations may be construed as defamatory or damaging to our client’s reputation and well-being,” before promising to “consider further legal remedies.”
Randazza savaged this effort:
I sense by the tenor of your demand that you don’t entirely believe in it yourself. I suspect that your conversation with Julia went something like “Julia, there’s not a thing you can do about this, are you out of your fucking mind?” Then something (other than conviction in the ideas expressed) convinced you to say “fine, I’ll send this stupid demand.” I’m sorry bro. I get it. Sometimes you just get stuck in a situation.
There’s no Rule 11 (or corollary) for a cease and desist. It is the least a lawyer can do and, in a situation like this, also the most.
I am going to take your threat literally – that if my client does not remove this content from his social media, you are going to consider further legal remedies. You’ll consider them, then realize that every one of them is fucking stupid. Then that will be the end of this.
Or you can escalate this, and we can make you look even dumber. Your move.
Demand letters make a lot of empty threats. Responses like this one attempt to impose a cover charge on the open bar of modern C&D farming.
(Full letter on the next page…)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.