LOS ANGELES (CN) — A lawsuit over a parody Twitter account, born of a long-running feud between a landlord's attorney and an eviction defense lawyer, is now in the hands of a jury.
On one side is Dennis Block, whose law firm is among the biggest landlord-side firms in Southern California, and who once bragged that he had "evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet Earth."
On the other side is Danny Bramzon, whose nonprofit tenant defense firm, Basta, is also one of the largest of its kind, with five offices in LA County, and is known for its especially aggressive tactic of demanding jury trials. Bramzon himself once boasted, "I'm fucking Robin Hood!"
"We are here for a simple reason," Block's lawyer, Christopher Frost, told the jury on Wednesday. "Because Daniel Bramzon has conducted himself like a self-righteous, self-indulgent bully. A bully that used his nonprofit corporation to target and continue a vendetta against Dennis Block."
Bramzon admitted, when he testified two weeks ago, that his lawyers sometimes call Block's lawyers "Blockheads," and that he once commissioned a piñata in the likeness of Dennis Block. The feud culminated, perhaps, with a Basta contractor purchasing the domain name "www.dennisblock.com," and setting up a Dennis Block parody Twitter account, formerly titled “Very Stable Genius Not Dennis P. Block,” now simply, "Not Dennis Block." Though its bio identified it as a parody account, the account's tweets included photos of Block's family and employees, insulting all of them in often cruel and juvenile ways.
Block and one of his former employees, attorney Hasti Rahsepar, sued Basta, Bramzon, and the contractor, Brett Schulte, for libel in 2017. On Wednesday, Frost suggested that jurors award Block $2.5 million, and Rahsepar $3.5 million.
Other lawsuits over Twitter parody accounts have been filed, but rarely, if ever, has one made it trial — in part because most of the suits are filed against Twitter, now known as X, itself, which has used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a shield. This was the case with former Congressman Devin Nunes' lawsuit over several parody accounts, including @DevinCow.
Somewhat surprisingly, Block's lawsuit survived an anti-SLAPP motion and the subsequent appellate review, in which the court ruled that the tweets were not protected by the anti-SLAPP statute because Block was not a celebrity and the tweets were not related to public discourse.
Now jurors must decide if Schulte — who stopped making court appearances and is in default — was acting as Bramzon's employee or authorized agent when he created the Twitter account, and when he wrote the offending tweets. If they decide he was, then they must decide if the tweets could be reasonably construed as making factual assertions.
"Even if you slap a label 'parody,' on it, is it okay to say those things about somebody online to the world?" Frost asked the jury on Wednesday.
Frost pointed to one tweet from 2018 which read, "To all the clients, judges, and opposing counsel who are always complaining about Hasti… yes we KNOW she’s too old to dress like that, but what can we do? 🤷🏻♂️"
Frost said the tweet was "asserting a provable fact that they know to be false, and by the way, misogynistic," adding, "they are not jokes."
In his closing remarks, Bramzon's attorney, Makoa Kawabata, said that while a number of the tweets in question might be offensive, context was key. The tweets, he said, were far from factual assertions, but the product of "somebody just trying to show his animus toward the people who are identified in the parody account."
That somebody, argued Kawabata and Basta attorney Eric Anderson, was Schulte, who once wrote in an email, referring to Block, "If you hate this guy as much as I do, here's some payback."
On Thursday, Bramzon and Basta's attorneys urged the jury to read the tweets from the @DennisPBlock account before rendering a judgment.
"No average reader would take any of this seriously," Kawabata said.
Anderson said that the plaintiff's position that the tweets are to be taken seriously amounts to the belief that "everybody's a moron." Kawabata read a number of tweets, one of which read, "I’m a lot like my hero Donald Trump, I have a wife who hates me, two disappointing sons, and a daughter I’d like to date."
"He wants $100,000 for this," Kawabata said.
"This is the sort of non-literal language people use to make fun of each other on Twitter," said Anderson.
He then displayed another tweet showing a picture of two Star Wars villains and read, "I have to admit I consider myself a little bit of each of them; no one could evict a tenant like the Empire," to which one juror audibly laughed.
Anderson happily acknowledged the laugh, and added a Johnny Cochran-esque line: "You can't give them money if you find it funny."
During his short rebuttal, Frost said, "Just because there's non-literal language everywhere on Twitter doesn't mean you can use it as a platform to vomit cruelty."
Jury deliberation will begin on Monday. Both Bramzon and Anderson have said that a verdict for the plaintiffs would likely mean the end of Basta.
Follow @hillelaron
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