An Update on our Lawsuit against Art Pedroza

A lot of people have been asking where things are with TheLiberalOC’s lawsuit against Orange Juice Blog publisher Art Pedroza.  It’s a question I get every time I attend a Drinking Liberally event and people I have never met in Santa Ana eagerly come to shake my hand and express gratitude to me about filing our lawsuit against Art. 

We’re still moving forward in federal court.  Our attorney tells us that the case has entered the discovery phase and Art has some deadlines coming up.  We gave him until May 7 to accept a (we think) very reasonable settlement offer we  made and May 26 is the deadline for him to turn over a number of documents and electronic files we requested.  To our knowledge, Art (still) doesn’t have a lawyer and Art continues to believe the case is frivolous. 

Art still refers to the case in posts and comments on Orange Juice and the FFFF site but he constantly get the details wrong.  For example, Art stated our lawsuit included 50 anonymous OJ bloggers.  That isn’t true.  There are 50 anonymous “John Does” who could be included in the suit if we find out someone helped or conspired with Art to purchase the domain names, attempt to sell them to us at a significant profit, and redirected the domains to gay porn sites and NAMBLA (The North American Man Boy Love Association which advocates legalized statutory rape of children by adult men). 

Art also continues to believe that his actions were justified under the “they started it” defense and that his purchase of web domains relating to TheLiberalOC, our friends and my business, offering them for sale at a significant profit and redirecting to “sites of Art’s choosing” like gay porn and NAMBLA was exactly the same as my purchase of www.artpedroza.com which was  briefly routed to a LiberalOC post about Art, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Additionally, Art doesn’t see how any damages were incurred.  Should he lose and should the judge throw the book at him, Art faces potential damages of $100,000 per domain under the law, and there are six of them.  Art has ceded the domains back to GoDaddy, but as we’ve been saying among ourselves all along, you can’t un-rob a bank.  Plus, the Court has the power to hold him liable for our costs and fees.

We filed suit to protect our rights and our names.  We’ve spent considerable time gathering evidence against him including dozens of mean-spirited and taunting emails, text messages and blog posts/comments.  There’s a mountain of documents that prove the material facts of the case.  And we’ve incurred considerable legal costs associated with this case plus time spent away from other things while we dealt with this lawsuit. 

We’re serious as heart attacks when it comes to this lawsuit.  And we’re confident we’ll prevail.

11 Comments

  1. I’m not familiar with that term; horses are great whatever color they are. And Tony isn’t part of the suit unless discovery reveals something we didn’t know that warrants his inclusion.

  2. yeah so many people are interested in this lame case that they are flooding this comment section with comments as you can see. gee i hope your server can handle all the traffic!

    • Well, I didn’t exactly put this up with the idea it was to generate comments. The idea was to communicate status and I think we did a pretty good job of doing that. Let’s see how “lame” it is when we win.

  3. This lawsuit coming from a guy who’s Wife publishes “Before” and “After” pictures of liver transplant paients.

    This lawsuit has all the merits of blown call on the ball field.

    GROW UP GUYS. Fight back with hard hitting reporting, not Cheesy lawsuits.

    • Ken/Jose – the lawsuit is all about protecting our names and our brand. But you must be OK with what Art did and where he linked my business name and where he linked other names. In my past experience with Art, any “agreement” you reach with him can be quickly tossed the minute he perceives you have violated it. We’ve had multiple “cease-fires” only to see the bombs still flying towards us. So suing and having a judge use the law to enforce a decision was the only route to take. The law is on our side. But interestingly enough, since both of you demand hard hitting reporting, perhapsd you could demand that of Art (or “Zorro” or “Admin”) who still routinely gtes stuff wrong or posts information that’s flat out inaccurate. I’ve mentioned before, the evidence that you’ve seenin the filing amounts to about 10 percent of what we have. Perhaps if you’ve seen all the evidence we already have, you’d have a different perspective. Filing the lawsuit is/was an entirely grown up way to deal with this.

  4. Mother and I were sitting around the less than stately Mill manor recently in discussion as to why several white guys would file suit against a Latino whose only crime was the promotion of sexual relationships between grown men and young children on websites he owns. Mother is convinced that racism plays a roll, but that may have just been the vodka talking.

  5. we are offering a settlement significant lower than the $100K oer domain penalty he faces. There;s a lot of factual errors in the OJ post. No surprise really

  6. so you’re giving him a discount? wow cheminowski thats very white of you. well i hope the douchebag pedroza is at least smart enough to reject any offer from you and call your bluff. it’s funny how many deals are made and cases dropped the morning of trial. if it even gets that far. what a waste of time this case is.

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