Yigal Mesika v. Craig Petty and Penguin Magic

Yigal Mesika is a magician who has a long standing reputation for stealing other magicians’ tricks and using patent law try and eliminate and intimidate his competition.  Maybe that reputation is fair, or maybe it is unfair.  But it exists.  

Our client, Craig Petty, reported on this reputation and on Mesika’s reputation of being a ‘litigious bully.”  So Yesika sued him for defamation.  The complaint is a jumbled mess with all the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit.   Accordingly, we filed an Anti-SLAPP motion.

The docket is much larger than what we are sharing here, but most of it is irrelevant.  

One interesting issue is the fact that a public figure has a higher burden in a defamation case than a private figure.  Mr. Mesika’s counsel insisted that his client is not a public figure.  Accordingly, we had to file an extensive “request for judicial notice” of an avalanche of information (this is just half of it) proving his public figure status.  This is demonstration of Brandolini’s law, or the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” which states that the energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the energy required to produce it. 

The case is ongoing.