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 court granted our Anti-SLAPP motion, but not in its entirety. Most of Mesika’s claims were dismissed, and his surviving claims for defamation and false light were stripped down only to statements about whether Mesika credited prior inventors regarding a device for which he filed a patent application, as well as statements about whether “very few” of Mesika’s applied-for patents are granted. The court denied the Anti-SLAPP Motion as to these statements because it felt that, on a motion to dismiss (where the court must accept the plaintiff’s factual allegations as true and can only consider limited evidence outside the complaint), it could not determine as a matter of law that these statements were true or that Mesika was a public figure, which would have required him to allege facts showing that Petty published his statements with actual malice. It may seem silly for Mesika to continue with a defamation lawsuit when such narrow claims are all that’s left, but that is another hallmark of a SLAPP plaintiff: the process is the punishment.

Because we prevailed on the majority of the Anti-SLAPP Motion, we filed a motion for recovery of most of Petty’s attorneys’ fees.