A comedian who was sued by the Lafayette mayor-president over a made-up, satirical antifa event at a local mall is now on the hook for the consolidated government’s attorney fees after courts rejected motions to dismiss the lawsuit.
John Merrifield’s fake antifa meeting announcements on Facebook in the summer of 2020 prompted the city-parish to try to recover the funds spent to send police to the mall in response to the fake meeting. In turn, Merrifield’s efforts to get the lawsuit dismissed as a violation of the state’s law barring strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) failed at the circuit and appeals court levels, as well as the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Now Lafayette Consolidated Government wants Merrifield to pay it more than $33,000 in attorney fees as a result of his losses in the state courts.
New Orleans attorney Andrew Bizer
| Bizer & DeReus
“We filed the anti-SLAPP motion to get this thing knocked out of court, and we lost,” Merrifield’s attorney, Andrew Bizer, told the Louisiana Record. “Because we lost, he is responsible for the reasonable attorney fees of the plaintiff, which is the city-parish.”
But during a recent hearing at the 15th Judicial District Court, the city-parish’s attorneys did not provide any invoices to document the $33,047.50 requested for attorney fees. The judge said such documentation was necessary.
“We will analyze it and try to figure out how much of that $33,000 is reasonable and how much isn’t,” Bizer said.
Merrifield is liable for the city-parish’s attorney fees even though the merits of the case still have not been resolved, Bizer said. The anti-SLAPP motion filed by Merrifield argued that the city-parish was attempting to silence him in violation of his First Amendment rights through a baseless legal case.
“It’s a ridiculous lawsuit,” Bizer said. “It’s nothing more than harassment. They are using a criminal statute civilly.”
During the course of the appeal, the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief on Merrifield’s behalf, arguing that facetious Facebook events are a common form of social humor and that facetious speech is protected by the Constitution.
“If the First Amendment protections are not afforded here, governments will be able to use the pretense of believing a clearly facetious event in order to penalize political commentary they dislike,” the foundation said in its filing.
In rejecting Merrifield’s efforts to dismiss the lawsuits, the state courts have yet to provide any analysis about why the litigation should go forward, Bizer said.