If you haven't had your dose of nutty legal claims of late, Adam Steinbaugh alerts us to the latest in the long and ongoing saga of our buddy Charles Carreon. When we last checked in on Carreon, he had more or less admitted that his legal threats against a satirical blogger making fun of him were baseless, and had voluntarily agreed to "settle" the case. In that effort, Carreon ignored the issue of legal fees, so the lawyers for the blogger - Paul Levy and Cathy Gellis - sought legal fees. Carreon went on a bizarre rant against Levy in his filing for an extension, trying to build up some conspiracy theory involving Levy somehow trolling the internet for people like himself to go after.

Of course, that ignores that Levy was going after Carreon because of Carreon's vexatious legal threats against the blogger - to the point that Carreon directly stated that he would wait until interest in the case had gone cold before suing and causing trouble for the blogger. And, even after all of this began, after Register.com stupidly gave up the name of the blogger (on no legal basis), Carreon (while avoiding being served himself) contacted the blogger's employer, Walgreens, and threatened to drag it into the lawsuit as well. Frankly, we could use a few more good lawyers trolling the web to seek to stop people like Carreon from making baseless legal threats.

Carreon has now filed his response to the attempt to get legal fees out of him, and in true Carreon fashion, it's quite a filing. First of all, it highlights that in responding to a discussion over legal fees, Carreon hit back at both Paul Levy and Ken 'Popehat' White with significant discovery efforts. White told Carreon to pound sand (more or less). Levy, it appears, delivered the requested documents. Of course, the documents don't show much of anything that impact the discussion at hand, but Carreon uses them to continue his attack on the satirical blogger.

Following all of this, Carreon actually inserts a reasonably logical argument for why legal fees may not be appropriate in this particular case. And it's true that the awarding of legal fees is somewhat rare in these kinds of cases, but it's certainly not unheard of. The key issue, for Carreon, is that he has to prove that this case is an "ordinary" case, because it's only in extraordinary cases that attorney's fees are likely to be awarded. As such, he ends up effectively defending the blogger's actions, grudgingly conceding that the First Amendment protected the satirical posts mocking Carreon.

But, because this is Carreon, and he just can't resist, it immediately veers off into wacky territory. He argues that granting legal fees in this case would allow any gripesite to go after those they're griping over for legal fees, violating the First Amendment rights of those being mocked.

Also, because this is Carreon (who has been given the motto "just keep digging" by parts of the internet), he digs in even further, arguing that vexatious legal threats aren't just protected by the First Amendment, but that they're also protected by "litigation privilege." In fact, he even argues (ridiculously) that the lawsuit against him could have been dismissed via an anti-SLAPP effort.

California law is clear on this point.... The Lawyer's email to Levy was eminently defensible in this litigation as speech protected by the litigation privilege, and no liability could have arisen from it. Indeed, the entire action might have been subject to dismissal by way of an Anti-SLAPP motion.

That is an... interesting reading of the law. As Steinbaugh summarizes:

I interpret Carreon's arguments to be that (1) the site is protected by the First Amendment, but the case is not exceptional because the speech isn't all that valuable; (2) sending legal threats is protected speech which is worth protecting; and (3) even if it were not protected speech, threatening letters are part of litigation and therefore are protected by the litigation privilege. Taken to their logical conclusion, Carreon essentially asserts that he has a First Amendment right to threaten and bring vexatious litigation.

We await the results of this case.