Talk:Vic Mignogna/@comment-10390252-20190909160815/@comment-38846708-20190914082556

Wow, talk about a load of bad takes you fellas got there. That's not how the Hearing  went. I would know, since I was actually at the hearing.

Let's clear up a few things. One, the TCPA Hearing only required the lawyers to be there. Literally none of the litigants needed to be there. The reason why the plaintiff Vic Mignogna wasn't at the hearing was because he wasn't required to. Ron Toye also wasn't at the hearing. Rial and Marchi were there for whatever reason, probably so they could pose for a picture for that trash paper Dallas News. Two, a TCPA hearing is not a trial. The only party that was allowed under the TCPA to need to provide evidence at the Hearing was the plaintiff, to show a prima facia case establishing each of the elements of the defamation. Basically, show enough "probable cause" evidence that one can make a rational inference to defamation. The defendants can't just provide their own counter evidence or try to disprove the plaintiff's evidence. That's not what the TCPA allows. Because Vic is the non-moving party in the TCPA (as that was filed by the defendants), all the evidence presented needs to be looked at in the light most favorable to Vic.

The big problem that made the whole Hearing such a fiasco was that Judge Chupp was off his rocker and did not preside over that hearing with the standards of the TCPA. The issue with that hearing was that the judge was overstepping his bounds in his unorthodox, arbitrary, and misapplied rulings that went against how the TCPA is set to work. There were times where he asked the plaintiff to provide a higher evidentiary burden that was higher than what the TCPA required. The Judge made several mistakes in his ruling. Ty Beard didn't just fumble around with barely any evidence. He and his team had 1200 pages of evidence that they had in their pleadings but when Beard went to give it to the Judge, the Judge wouldn't accept it for some arbitrary reason. And that is NOT how that is supposed to work. From there, the hearing was going to o off tracks. This isn’t the Judge applying the TCPA standard and dismissing most of Vic’s claims. This is the Judge not applying the TCPA standards of the law and arbitrarily dismissing those claims.

I was at the hearing. I flew down to Texas just for it. And I have a few uncles down there who are Texas certified lawyers so I invited them and a few of their lawyer buddies to come with me to the hearing. They weren’t as involved with the whole minutiae of the Vic situation as I was, so they had only a general idea of the whole Vic case. And by the end of that fiasco of a hearing, they were fuming at how ridiculous the ruling was and how the Judge had arbitrarily and severely misapplied the TCPA legal standards and that there were several actions taken by the Judge that went beyond the bounds of a TCPA hearing. They gave their strong professional legal opinions that most of the dismissed claims had strong appeal points. They said that the plaintiff would obviously file a motion to reconsider to make the Judge reconsider the evidence on the record that he had clearly failed to even look at. And then there’s also appeals. The recent hearing was a lost battle but not a lost War.

A whole lot of stuff about the ruling doesn’t make sense at all and you don’t have to be a lawyer, law student, or judge to see that.

1.      In regards to the Funimation tweet, the evidential standard is a preponderance of the evidence. Basically, would a rational person make the inference that Funimation’s Tweets were defaming Vic? The answer to that should’ve been obviously yes. The tweet of them announcing the termination of Vic’s employment and the Tweet of them saying they don’t condone harassment and whatnot were in the same thread! Given the allegations of misconduct levied against Vic at the time, any rational person would’ve made the rational inference that Vic was apparently fired for harassment or something like that. And given Funi’s Social Media Guy Scott Baretto admitting that it was his job to be aware of all the social media rumblings about Funimation and their employees and contractors AND that it was him who drafted the Tweets, Funimation can’t even claim ignorance about not knowing about the allegations against Vic when they made their defamatory tweets!

2.      Slatosch’s unsworn statement should’ve been the smoking gun for proving TI on Rial and Toye. That’s the con owner himself making a statement that Toye and Rial personally contacted him and pressured him into breaking his contract with Vic. If that isn’t proof of TI, then nothing is!

3.      Vic’s unsworn statement where he categorically and specifically denies all the defamatory statements made against him should’ve been another silver bullet for Vic’s side. That would’ve been taken as evidence and it would’ve proven falsity. Not only that but given that there were only 2 people involved in the alleged situations, that would’ve shown that the defendants KNEW that the statements they were making were false, which constitutes malice, which meets the public figure standard of burden of proof. Not only that, but at the TCPA stage, in a prima facia case, the defense doesn’t get the right to disprove the plaintiff’s evidence. ALL the evidence must be taken in the light most favorable to the plaintiff which is Vic. That’s the law and it makes no sense why the judge ruled like it was the opposite!

4.      The judge’s demand for giving a precise amount for damages makes no sense! They were being sued for defamation per se. If someone were to defame you by accusing you of a serious crime like murder, rape, pedophilia, rape, sexual misconduct, etc., that would constitute defamation per se, in which the damages are presumed and don’t have to be proven because statements of such defamatory nature would of course be damaging. It doesn’t make any fucking sense for Judge Chupp to not understand that damages are presumed in defamation per se! Seriously, how did he miss that?!

That Judge bumbled his way through that hearing and arbitrarily misapplied the legal standards of the TCPA. A lot of the dismissed claims should not have been dismissed, especially when there was  clear and specific evidence to make a rational inference of it. But even then, the defamation claims from Funimation, Rial, and Toye are still there. And those are the Megalodons of the case, the most important and biggest charges. For one thing, the pllaintiff was able to archive 400+ defamatory Tweets from Rial and Toye. They aren't getting out of that. And neither will Funimation with what they did. And Funimation is the party with the biggest pockets. It's where the money is at. And their parent company Sony has deep pockets. If Vic passes the TCPA hearing with those defamation claims intact, he can be liable to a lot of settlement money.

Anywyas, if any of you wanted to get a more indepth account of how the hearing went, from the perspectives and mouths of people who were actually at the damn hearing, here are 2 links to Rekieta Law Streams which will give you exactly that. The first one is from Nick Rekieta, a Minnesota state certified lawyer who's been up to date with the case long enough to give you a pretty damn good legal analysis of Texas Law and what exactly from a lawyer's perspective went wrong or right in that hearing. He's #IStandWithVic but he gives pretty fair criticism for all parties involved. The second link is Rekieta with 3 other people who were there at the hearing, with eveyrone sharing their accounts.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_LmbyE80aY

2)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4GU9X8HaZU