Charles Carreon a World Wide Web Attorney- that had the tables turned on him
Vanessa Kachadurian can relate to this,
The legal and Internet world had fun with Charles Carreon a
self professed “internet attorney” that set out to harm the wrong person and as
attorneys who specialize in the internet do, merely try to harm, harass,
intimidate and file vexatious claims. As
we all know you cannot litigate truth, and they have not gone to law school to
learn this new niche area of law they have created in a somewhat “wild west
fashion” of sloppiness, stretching the law and in fact trying to win at any
cost even stealing someones photos, putting out fake websites, false arrests,
and other amateur and immature things that only prove they are the lowest scum
of the earth. It seems Charles Carreon,
is once such internet attorney that
decided to stop while he was ahead, but then it didn’t stop the internet
from playing him at his own game. No one
likes an idiot that thinks they can control freedom of speech or the
internet. One particular Internet
Attorney that I had issues with is still trying to desperately carve a name for
himself with freebie writing on the Huffington Blog (he no longer writes for
the Santa Monica Free press that he claims he won awards for) and he no longer
represents Value Click. This loser
lawyer also has a free radio blog that I understand no more than 2 people on
Wednesday morning even listen to. Here
is a warning to the likes of Charles Carreon and other so called “internet
attorneys” here is how the internet bites back and you end up losing because of
stupidity and harming someone at all costs.
Remember anyone can file a law suit/complaint for the stupidest of
reasons. It doesn’t even have to be
truthful, in fact if you are only trying to silence someone it is better that
it is false and you scare someone into silence.
Victim of Internet Attorney Sleazeball with a mental disorder
Vanessa Kachadurian
Last year,
embattled Arizona lawyer Charles Carreon brought a lawsuit against The
Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, doubling down by suing anonymous
Internet commenters and even two charities, the National Wildlife Federation
and the American Cancer Society. (The whole crazy story also involved a
cartoon of an obese woman asking a bear to "Come hurr and love
meeee!") Things got even weirder when Carreon threatened Chris Recouvreur, also
known "Satirical Charles," who had created a website mocking Carreon.
Recouvreur then sued Carreon in federal court for a declarative judgement that
his site was not libelous.
In a Tuesday legal filing with the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals, Charles Carreon dropped his final appeal in the
Recouvreur case and now definitively owes over $46,000 in fees to
Recouvreur.
Now Carreon
says he regrets the entire affair. Why? Largely because it has unleashed the
wrath of angry people on the Internet and has subsequently damaged his
reputation online.
“I genuinely
say it was a dumb thing,” Carreon told Ars. “This is not a soluble problem.
This is not a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or
a counter cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really
reassess the decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea. You really are
dealing with a situation that is not amenable to legal resolution.”
“I made it worse”
Carreon was a
little-known lawyer until June 2012, at which point he began representing the
website FunnyJunk.com and sued Matthew Inman, demanding $20,000 over comments
Inman had made about FunnyJunk's habit of hosting Inman's cartoons. Inman then
turned around and raised $100,000, giving that money to charity instead of to
Carreon, at which point Carreon escalated his legal filings. At one point,
Carreon even threatened to subpoena Ars
Technica. (Ars’ collected coverage of the entire affair can be read here.)
In a 30-minute
phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of
this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as
he calls it, "rapeutated." In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at
Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long,
and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours
truly and two more Ars staffers. If you'd like to see a picture of Carreon's
critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their
mouths, that too can be accommodated.
In short,
Carreon portrays himself as the victim here—he’s now become the victim of the Streisand effect, or as it might now be called, the Carreon
effect.
“So when you
take a situation in which the legal rules don’t impose any effective sanctions
on people for that kind of behavior, mob behavior on the Internet, then a legal
analyst like myself should look at that situation and say: ‘You can’t fix
everything that’s broken,’” he said. “There is not a proper legal remedy for
it. I attempted to do something and I made it worse.”
“It’s an insoluble
problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching
‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense.
How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You
can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective
clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon
reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t
sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that
Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”
But lest the
Internet think that Carreon is a bad guy with a continual ax to grind, he
suggested that his Buddhist religion can help him forgive those who have
wronged him.
“If I feel that
something that I have said should not have been said, and somebody calls it to
my attention, I generally will alter or retract it,” he said. “[Similarly,] if
anyone wants to contact me in any reasonable manner, I will be happy to hear
it. The point of speech is to spark discussion. My goal is to help people to
realize that you’re not the only person who gets rapeutated. You need to put on
your own psychological resources together to survive it. Of course this is
difficult. The fact that I try to bear it with aplomb, it is difficult. Yeah, I
have a lot of shit to process—I’m glad I'm a resilient person.”
“It doesn’t
matter what my intentions are,” he added. “I’m learning the rules of the game.
I’ve learned about mobs. I’ve learned about how blithely we can deal with other
people. I never thought that people would say things about me that they did.
I’m always learning. If I didn’t learn, I would truly be stupid. The fact that
I learn slowly or don't know things that other people know, that doesn't make
me genuinely stupid, it makes me situationally stupid.”
Vanessa Kachadurian
The easy way or the hard way
Though the
legal battles sparked by Carreon's actions have ceased, it's up to Recouvreur's
attorney, Paul Alen Levy of Public Citizen,
to recover the money. Levy told Ars on Wednesday that it would be very easy for
Carreon to finally wrap up this entire story.
“He makes a
payment, we agree that he’s made the payment, and there’s a satisfaction of
judgement,” Levy said. “That’s the simple way to do it.” If not, Levy will have
to go through legal discovery to determine the size of Carreon's assets.
Levy said there
isn’t a chance that he and his client will allow the case to be dropped without
any consequences for Carreon.
“Given the
amount, it’s hard to walk away from it,” he said. “We’re not willing to let the
money just sit there. I really don’t know at this point what assets [Carreon]
has. He has a law practice. Presumably he’s getting paid at his law
practice—but you hate to think about that.”
As for Carreon,
he wouldn't be pinned down on whether he would pay, but he did say that the
whole ordeal had been a strain.
“Whenever you
have to spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not remunerative, that is
financial hardship,” Carreon said. “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing
me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.”
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Internet lawyer
finally drops his legal battle against The Oatmeal
29Shares
 char
Charles Carreon, the lawyer
who tried to sue webcomic The
Oatmeal for making fun of a site that republished Oatmeal comics, has
finally quit the extended legal fight.
Carreon called
the ordeal "dumb."
He was, you may
recall, the lawyer who initially represented theoretically-humorous image
hosting site FunnyJunk against Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman. In 2011, Inman
wrote a blog post condemning FunnyJunk for republishing his cartoons. A year
later, Carreon sent him a letter: take down that defaming post, or we're suing
you for $20,000.
Of course, that
suit didn't have a lot of legs, and it culminated with Inman refusing, raising
$220,000 for charity, and drawing a cartoon of Carreon's mother loving a bear.
Meanwhile, a
second humorist named Christopher Recouvreur started up a blog and Twitter
account called Satirical Charles, which parodied Carreon's mishaps. After
failing to beat Inman, Carreon threatened Recouvreur with a libel suit. The two
then wrangled in court, and Carreon ended up owing the third-party parodist $46,100
in damages.
In a Thursday interview
with Ars Technica,
Carreon seemed to finally realize the folly of publicly challenging a beloved
online cartoonist on behalf of a site that republishes his work.
"This is not
a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or a counter
cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really reassess the
decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea," he told Ars. He also noted that
Oatmeal fans ended up plastering
his books with one-star reviews on Amazon.
But life's not all
bad for Carreon now. According to his website, his law practice is
open for business, and he's got one of the top 5% viewed profiles on LinkedIn.
Illustration
by Jason Reed
Charles Carreon, the lawyer
who tried to sue webcomic The
Oatmeal for making fun of a site that republished Oatmeal comics, has
finally quit the extended legal fight.
Carreon called
the ordeal "dumb."
He was, you may
recall, the lawyer who initially represented theoretically-humorous image
hosting site FunnyJunk against Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman. In 2011, Inman
wrote a blog post condemning FunnyJunk for republishing his cartoons. A year
later, Carreon sent him a letter: take down that defaming post, or we're suing
you for $20,000.
Of course, that
suit didn't have a lot of legs, and it culminated with Inman refusing, raising
$220,000 for charity, and drawing a cartoon of Carreon's mother loving a bear.
Meanwhile, a
second humorist named Christopher Recouvreur started up a blog and Twitter account
called Satirical Charles, which parodied Carreon's mishaps. After failing to
beat Inman, Carreon threatened Recouvreur with a libel suit. The two then
wrangled in court, and Carreon ended up owing the third-party parodist $46,100
in damages.
In a Thursday interview
with Ars Technica,
Carreon seemed to finally realize the folly of publicly challenging a beloved
online cartoonist on behalf of a site that republishes his work.
"This is not
a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or a counter
cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really reassess the
decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea," he told Ars. He also noted
that Oatmeal fans ended up plastering
his books with one-star reviews on Amazon.
But life's not all
bad for Carreon now. According to his website, his law practice is
open for business, and he's got one of the top 5% viewed profiles on LinkedIn.
Illustration
by Jason Reed
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