for those keeping track, one of the main lawyer guys on twitter who's not involved but keeping track is one Greg Doucette, and his enormous thread is here
doucette does a decently good job of answering questions people have for him, explaining some stuff, and just bothering the shit out of vicstans who try to come after him
he can still rely on fundamentalists/his family, alas, but he's not gonna get that 'superstardom' he so desperately tried to cultivate and succeeded with for a long while.
The more about this I read the more I'm convinced its turned into the legal equivalent of a dude holding a lighter and a gas can shouting "HEY GUYS, CHECK THIS OUT!"
I also cannot stress enough how much I love the fact that Greg wandered into this whole thing with "Who is Vic and why does he have an idiot representing him?"
note that i'm passing a lot of stuff rom other plurks on my tl i see about this subject, as i am technically at work and can't dig into the whole thing as i'd like
I mean, it makes sense if you remind yourself that a venn diagram of the people who believe Vic's got a slam dunk case here and the people who thought the same about the Honey Badgers is pretty much a circle
MRA gamer people who got kicked out of a con for predictable reasons, The Mary Sue wrote an article about it afterward, and they sued the con for kicking them out because of the article.
vic: everything I did was consensual. it was sensual, and i did it at a convention In this piece, the role of Vic Mignona is played by Billy West doing his Zapp Brannigan voice
"(3) And then after you voluntarily - WITHOUT AN ACTUAL QUESTION, YOU INCOMPARABLE BUFOON - say that they called you and told you it was because VA's came out, the "I don't know if there was direct contact" really doesn't help.
The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that Vic will be able to fall back on the rabid section of his fanbase and the MRAs who are deeply invested in him being a PERSECUTED MARTYR
Because people who want to believe, against literally all evidence - up to and including the court telling him he's full of shit - that he's totally a good guy and everyone who hates him or has been hurt by him is a FILTHY LIAR are just going to keep denying reality to do so.
Either he's going to become even more of a creepy predator within his fanbase until he actually gets caught and prosecuted, he's going to start picking up MRA and/or white supremacist talking points(those two groups have a lot of overlap) because they're the ones who are supporting him and telling him he doesn't deserve any of this, or both
Sadly, MRAs and white supremacists are both really good at recruiting shitty men because they'll tell them exactly what they want to hear - namely, that they're perfectly fine the way they are and the world is what's bad
Someone who's been a gross pedophile and sexual abuser for, what, thirty years??? That's a lot of chances to turn around your behavior and doubling down on it instead
he was already on his way out in VA (broly was his high-profile job in years), especially with Gen no longer being in charge of Funi and giving Vic preferential treatment, but this slap suit reveals he's not only a walking lawsuit but vengeful and petty
yeah, most employers google or check facebook, and Vic's name is gonna be associated with 'hey I creep on teenage girls and have locks specifically meant to keep me out'
For Funi: "We've reconsidered and Vic will continue roles he has and in future seasons. Also the GFM money will be matched and quadrupled and given to RAINN"
Huber basically asked victims of sexual assault to publicly state that their cases weren't that serious and that their accusations had harmed real sexual assault victims
Funi doesn't need to take him back, even if somehow they loose this case, Texas is an at will state and iirc voice actors aren't permanent staff anyway, it's season by season contract work
Oh Huber. I used to like you. (By “you,” I mean “Hiei and your jokes on the YYH actor commentaries,” bc I never actually knew anything else about you, but I digress.) anyway, is Huber getting a reduction in work off this? I’ve never heard him in anything not FUNi-related while Vic I remember doing work for ADV
i was hoping maybe someone had been able to put everything together bc yeah it looks like there's so much...last i knew of was funimation dropping him and Rial and co gearing up to go against him despite his insane fans
But tl;dr: Vic says he's going to gracefully accept Funi's decision to drop him. However, then... I believe it's Rekeita, an infamous ~youtube lawyer~ who once did blackface, he makes a GoFundMe to fund Vic's legal fees to sue Funi, Monica, and a few others for "defamation", which Vic more than happily accepts
it should be noted that, when he announced his support for this GFM, he said the supposed leftovers would go to notoriously bigoted Salvation Army, but that's a person bit of bitterness on my end
so that riles up his anime fanbase and the misogynistic alt right/gamergater/etc types who've latched onto him because they're also scumbags. meanwhile, everyone else is like "...you think you're really gonna beat Funi?"
Some time passes, and then some legal transcripts are made public that don't make Vic's side look particularly... good. or professional. or skilled. The most notable one being, iirc, how Ty Beard the lawyer didn't introduce himself until like ten minutes before the initial court meeting was due to end
as someone who works in a courthouse, that's basically incredibly rude and not professional, the judge had assumed he was a client up until that point and not a lawyer
the biggest thing we had for a while was a partially omitted transcript of the deposition that was attached to something the defendants (funi,monica, etc) had filed to prove this case was a SLAPP
basically, when someone is using the court system not because they have any actual basis for a case, but as a form of harassment. and it's already pretty hard for someone to prove defamation, especially when they're a public figure. you know. like a famous voice actor.
then the whole deposition was leaked, especially because, like.... Vic's team, the youtube laywer, was posting it on his youtube and livestreaming stuff, including the actual video that was filmed in court
and all of it, transcript and video alike, show that Vic is constantly putting his foot in his mouth by admitting to a bunch of stuff. Like he admitted to grabbing another VA's hair and pulling on it. He admitted to hiring sex workers. He refused to admit there might be an issue to kissing underage girls on the face. etc etc
anyway, yeah, it's a trashfire. the youtube lawyer is trying to claim this is helping, somehow, and lying to a lot of people about how this is totally a sign that Vic will win.... despite Vic admitting he's a public figure and that he doesn't have any actual evidence that funi and the other VAs are responsible for his loss of work
anyway, now we're getting public filings from people like Marchi, the woman whose hair Vic pulled, establishing this as a SLAPP filing and that it should be tossed out because Vic is full of shit
Various lawyers on twitter discovered this as well - Greg Doucette's Threadnaught has been going for over forty days by now - and they've been ripping on Vic and his lawyer(s) ever since.
if you have a lot of time to waste, going through greg doucette's giant threadnought- which has broken Twitter*- is pretty enlightening both on this case and on some legal stuff
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2019-04-19/vic-mignogna-sues-funimation-jamie-marchi-monica-rial-ronald-toye/.145898
Nick: I never said that
hold my beer,judge: wait, are you the lawyer for the plaintiffty beardlaw: yes
judge: are you sure
vic: everything I did was consensual. it was sensual, and i did it at a conventionIn this piece, the role of Vic Mignona is played by Billy West doing his Zapp Brannigan voice
If you didn't know, you shouldn't have sued."
Is it just me, or do a lot of these great lines, like the "Are you sure?" bit, sound like something straight out of an Ace Attorney case?
LET ME IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINthe face of someone who isn't sorry about getting in my way