Last week, “Reckless” Ben Schneider did Wired’s “Autocomplete Interview” which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is “Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?” and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn’t one of Reckless Ben’s current lawyers):
Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?
My whole thing with when it comes to the law is it’s so boring. And so, how do you create entertaining content about something that’s so boring? You do the exact opposite!
I basically just think like, what would a lawyer tell me to do? And then I’m like, I just, okay, let’s scrap that idea. Let’s do the exact opposite.
You know, I want to make a lawyer like cringe in his chair, you know, cuz that’s what’s fun.
And so, no, I don’t have a law degree because if I did, I’d probably be more careful and then being more careful would result in me being more boring.
Watch the whole thing here:
This really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given that many of the posts I’ve written about him have basically been begging him to speak to a lawyer before digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself, legally.
Still, he does seem to have taken at least some of the “get a lawyer” talk to heart in the case that Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM Franchising”) filed against him (the same case in which BAM settled with the Mansells and dropped its claims against Bryan Mansell, while still pressing ahead against Schneider and some of his colleagues — though Mansell is now claiming that BAM did not, in fact return all the Lego sets he’s owed, and some of the sets it gave him were not from his collection).
Specifically, Schneider and his colleague Victor Nguyen have filed an anti-SLAPP motion against BAM. Utah only got its current, much stronger anti-SLAPP law in the middle of 2023, becoming just the fourth state to adopt a standardized anti-SLAPP law known as the UPEPA, for Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. Since then, a bunch more states have followed (the Uniform Law Commission tracks the enactments, currently at 17), which is great to see.
Schneider’s lawyers, from the firm of Spencer Fane, make it clear that BAM’s lawsuit is an obvious SLAPP:
Plaintiffs do not like that Reckless Ben highlighted the Mansells’ predicament, the methods used, and the publicity generated by the videos. But Plaintiffs cannot weaponize the courts to suppress Reckless Ben’s work or his First Amendment rights, particularly where Plaintiffs have now “recognize[d] that the Mansell family experienced a genuine loss,” as reported by Reckless Ben….
Utah’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), Utah Code section 78B-25- 101 et seq., is meant to prevent precisely this type of effort. UPEPA is “an ‘anti-SLAPP’ act” or a statute protecting parties faced with a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” UHS of Provo Canyon, Inc. v. Bliss, 2024 WL 4279243, at *3 (D. Utah Sept. 24, 2024). Although “SLAPPs are often cloaked as otherwise standard claims of defamation, civil conspiracy, tortious interference, nuisance, and invasion of privacy, just to name a few,” UPEPA combats the misuse of such claims to avoid the “unifying features” of SLAPPs, which “make them a dangerous force” by “ensnar[ing] their targets in costly litigation that chills society from engaging in constitutionally protected activity.” …
The same dangerous features exist here, but Plaintiffs took additional steps to chill protected speech. Faced with negative exposure, Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit and immediately sought an overreaching temporary restraining order (TRO) based on assertions of fact in a Verified Complaint. Reckless Ben had no opportunity to object to the TRO but was immediately prohibited from speaking about the evolving story, violating his First Amendment rights and impairing his livelihood. At the same time, Plaintiffs freely spoke about the situation, attempting (unsuccessfully) to convince the world they had done nothing wrong. In doing so, however, Plaintiffs directly contradicted key allegations they made in filing this suit and obtaining the TRO. While this unfolded, Reckless Ben was silenced by a TRO that operated as a gag order.
Although the TRO has since been amended by stipulation, Plaintiffs have not abandoned their suit. Despite admissions undermining their case and despite multiple significant flaws with the claims, Plaintiffs persist with thirteen causes of action, most of which fail as a matter of law but will inevitably require substantial costs to defend.
The Court should stop this quintessential SLAPP effort by applying UPEPA and dismissing most of Plaintiffs’ claims.
The filing walks through the basics of the dispute, including the fact that BAM never actually identifies any specific statements that were defamatory.
Ben’s lawyers also make the same point I did, that when BAM settled with the Mansells, they effectively undermined their whole RICO case against Ben.
BAM now admits “the Mansells experienced a genuine loss and a great deal of uncertainty and frustration” and has agreed to dismiss all claims against Mr. Mansell and to pay for the LEGO collection at issue…. In public statements, including a joint statement with the Mansells, BAM confirmed it paid a settlement amount and “issued an unqualified apology to the Mansell family for the losses and pain suffered from the events surrounding this dispute.”… With payments for the property at issue and unequivocal apologies, Reckless Ben correctly reported that BAM “stole” the LEGOs, to the extent such statements can be deemed defamatory at all. As such, BAM’s claims based on defamation must fail.
There’s a lot more in the filing about how both the defamation and RICO claims are ridiculous and should fail, but the key part is that under the UPEPA anti-SLAPP law, if Schneider prevails here, the fee award is mandatory, and BAM would be on the hook for his attorneys’ fees and costs, which would be quite a satisfactory conclusion to this particular story.
So yeah, sometimes what the lawyers do is boring. But it might also get you out of a massive, censorial lawsuit that seeks to bankrupt you… and get the other side to pay for it all.
But speaking of people in this dispute who should speak to lawyers, well, Joshua Johnson (one of the guys who took over the shop that had the consignment deal) might want to get on the phone with one quickly. Because he apparently took a phone call from “some random guy” with a YouTube channel, spoke to him for about an hour, and appears to have said a bunch of things that undermine this very case in which Johnson is one of the named plaintiffs. Oops.