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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3884 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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a really minor debt

To be fair, forty thousand pounds (fifty thousand dollars) is not what I would call "really minor".

The original debt, if I'm reading all this correctly, was 13,500gbp, circa October 2019 about $17k. The increase is from interest accrued because he didn't pay the debt when it was accrued.

Maybe I need to check my privilege, but if $17k is change your name and move money for you, come on dude, get your life together. I have this conversation regularly about college debt, low five figures of debt should be easily workable if you're a real person in a western country in 2022, if you're either smart enough to have gone to a real college or smart enough that I should listen you. If you're a genius, as people have cited Emil to me, it should be practically meaningless to get it paid.

Six figures, fine, flee to avoid paying into a system you hate. But $17k? Just pay it and move on with your life.

Can you summarize why he owes that? I’m too lazy to click through all the links.

It's real simple. Emil did an edgy age of consent post calling for age of consent at 13 or lower, some writer called him a pedo linking to the post, Emil sued the guy for libel. Emil lost, now he owes court costs.

He filed a defamation lawsuit (over three comments under an article on Unz‌.com and one tweet), effectively lost at the preliminary-injunction stage (before the trial proper) (because the comments were statements of opinion backed up by linked articles, rather than assertions of fact backed up by nothing), and was ordered to pay half of the target's attorney fees (i. e., 13,500 pounds). He failed to pay that half, and the debt has mounted higher ever since.

What the hell how are the attorney fees for a case that didn’t even have a proper trial 13.5kx2=27k?? It this normal?

Smith (the target of the lawsuit) does not provide his "detailed assessment of costs" in the linked blogposts. Two items may be worth noting, however:

  • An entire year passed from the filing of the lawsuit (2018-12-07) to the denial of the injunction (2019-12-10); and

  • The law firm that Smith employed behaved badly enough that Smith sued the firm and recovered from it the other half of his costs (i. e., another 13,500 pounds).

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