Karl versus Billy: Day 0

by ersatz_cats

Greetings from sunny Brisbane! Yes, it is finally that time. It’s been six and a half years since notorious video game fraud Billy Mitchell was caught cheating at Donkey Kong. People have leapt from middle school to university in the time this nonsense has gone on. Of course, this whole ordeal would have been over on day one if Silly Billy had just published a confession and apology, and most everyone would have forgiven him long ago if he had. But no, he and his cronies piled on more lies, plus yet more lies to cover up the initial lies. And then Billy started suing everyone, demanding millions (yes, millions) of dollars in damages, all while lying in deposition, faking evidence, etc. And all of that finally, in the Year of our Lord 2024, brings us to District Court in Brisbane, hometown of YouTuber Karl Jobst, where Billy – much to his inevitable regret – will finally get his day in court.

You see, unlike American courts, where crazed litigants can bleed defendants dry even when they have no case, Australia has an actually reasonable legal system, where the outcome of a lawsuit like the one Billy filed against Karl involves the loser paying some if not all of the winner’s legal fees. As you all know, earlier this year legacy scorekeeper Twin Galaxies reached an out-of-court settlement with Billy to end his lawsuit against them. That legal battle was an endless drain of resources, with little hope of reward, making an otherwise downer settlement a reasonable proposition. (And even with his claimed “victory”, Billy still didn’t get anything he wanted, lol.) And there are actually a few more differences with the Australian legal system, which we’ll get to a bit later. But the point of today’s update is to get everyone back up to speed on this story, as we set the stage for the Video Game Trial of the Century… OF THE WEEK.

(On, and content warning: While I try to keep my writing fun in general, we unfortunately will have to discuss an act of self-harm, which I hope to handle seriously and respectfully.)

ALL RECAP ALL THE WAY DOWN

Normally, this is where I say “Skip ahead to the next section if you don’t need a recap”, but today, the recap is kind of the whole point. While Karl Jobst made occasional remarks on the infamous Todd Rogers Dragster dispute on social media, and on the Twin Galaxies dispute thread before it was taken down, his commentary career really began in late 2018, when he began producing speedrun- and gaming-related videos on YouTube. Between his quality content, and his pedigree as one of the best Goldeneye speedrunners of all time, Karl’s channel took off, going from a few thousand views on his earliest videos to averaging around one million videos per upload today.

Of course, badass reporting such as Karl’s is bound to draw the ire of a few liars and cheaters. He’s covered cheating scandals in everything from Rubix cubing to speed typing, and of course his true passion, video game speedrunning. He’s reported on cheated runs in many video games, including Minecraft, Guitar Hero, Trackmania, Super Mario 64, and Osu. Almost a year ago, Karl exposed charity fraud on the part of indie gaming darling Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil. And not long ago, he helped expose an elaborate fake blindfold speedrun by streamer Queen Pwnzalot. (And all of that is when Karl is not celebrating genuine gaming accomplishments in pixelated FPS games from the ’90s.) However, even with Karl having gained all these enemies, to my knowledge the only insecure loser to actually initiate litigation against him has been you-know-who.

In summer 2020, Karl received a “concerns notice” from Australian lawyers representing Billy, following his video titled “Guinness World Records Should Stay Out Of Gaming”. In Australia, a “concerns notice” is a mandatory first step prior to filing a lawsuit for defamation. After all, the court doesn’t want to get bogged down in such nonsense, and so if people can be urged to resolve their differences without litigation, that’s better for everyone. These notices read just like every legal threat you’ve ever seen, “You have 14 days to retract your vile and untrue statements, or we will escalate to our last recourse of legal action blah blah blah”. What’s funny is, Billy wasn’t even the focus of the video in question. It was about Guinness World Records’ terrible adjudication of competitive video gaming. (If you’re looking for that video, it has since been taken down because Guinness filed a copyright strike.) But part of the story of that video was Guinness’ gutless decision to reinstate claimed scores from Billy which had been proven fraudulent. Unsurprisingly, Karl didn’t back down. Karl’s later coverage would go on to elicit two more “concerns notices” including one over an Angry Video Game Nerd meme someone else made, which Karl chose to include as a joke. If the point of these legal threats was to discourage Karl from dunking on Billy, let’s just say it was an epic failure.

While the first and third of these legal threats went nowhere, the second one is what’s bringing the attention of gamers around the world to Brisbane. In 2021, Billy decided he had finally caught Karl doing something which, in the business, they call “actionable”. However, being an Australian citizen, Karl could only effectively be sued in Australian courts. Thus, after years of legal process, an Australian judge will soon decide A) if Karl Jobst really did defame Billy, and B) if that alleged defamation resulted in any damages.

ONLY KIDDING

Before we get to the alleged defamation itself, there’s a related incident we need to cover first. I know, I hate to jump around timelines and narratives like that, but with so many layers, sometimes you have no choice.

In 2018, after the MAME evidence against Billy’s bogus Donkey Kong scores was published, a different young YouTuber from Oregon who went by the name Apollo Legend made a video, commenting on the news of Billy Mitchell cheating. Subsequently, Apollo and a friend flew out to a public appearance by Billy in Florida, basically to seek comments from Billy and his cronies and to collect evidence. Following a legal threat by Billy (yes, he loves to do that), Apollo disappeared for a while, leading to rumors (both serious and silly) that Apollo had passed away. Class act that Billy Mitchell is, when he heard this rumor, he immediately took to texting multiple people, gloating over Apollo’s reported death.

Above is the relevant text conversation between Billy and Carlos Pineiro, who was volunteering as Billy’s technical expert at the time. (Note that Carlos had a change of heart soon after this exchange, and he is now likely to be testifying for Karl in the current legal battle.) It’s important to know that, at the time of these messages, Billy had only known Carlos for like a month. They weren’t old friends or anything. Billy felt so comfortable laughing about reports of the end of this kid’s life (excuse me, young adult’s life) that he was texting his elation to people he barely knew. In fact, he sent the same initial message to Jace Hall as well, as seen in later court filings:

And we only know of these two recipients because they came forward and provided the messages in TG’s legal defense. How many people were on Mister “I hope my enemies literally die”‘s mailing list?

I’m a bit curious to see what story Billy has for these messages. (And we may find out this week!) He’ll likely try to pass it off as though he were joking, as if we don’t understand his style of dark humor or something. However, a few observations stand out to me:

1) At the time of those texts, Billy did not know if the rumors were true. Imagine saying those things about someone – especially someone you’ve already threatened to sue – and then hypothetically learning the reports were accurate.

2) If Apollo really was dead, Billy would have had no way of knowing how. Was it suicide? Was he murdered? Was it cancer? Apparently, any of those would have brought a smile to Billy’s face.

While Billy is known for his lies, I believe this was a rare moment of truth when he said he hoped Carlos would find something to corroborate the rumors.

In 2020, Billy would go on to file a frivolous defamation lawsuit against Apollo Legend in Florida, seeking a million dollars in damages. The actual filing was bare bones, simply listing random things Apollo said and did that irritated Billy without really identifying a single tangible offense on Apollo’s part. Apollo was initially defiant in the face of this baseless lawsuit, declaring in a subsequent video:

I will not give him a single penny. I will not delete a single video.

However, despite this early bravado, in August of that year, Apollo did ultimately reach out to Billy and seek an out-of-court settlement. The terms of this agreement were confidential – and that will be very important in a moment – but the one thing that was made certain at the time of Apollo’s settlement announcement was that Billy had been given ownership of each of Apollo’s videos about Billy. Obviously this meant they were all removed from Apollo’s channel, but it also meant that Billy could, as the new rightful owner, use DMCA tools to have any reuploads taken down from YouTube or any other hosting site at any time. It also meant that Apollo would no longer receive revenue from these videos, which were among his most viewed.

What was not so widely known at the time of this settlement was that Apollo was battling a private struggle for his physical and mental health. In December of that year, Apollo Legend, known to his friends and family as Benjamin Smith, took his own life.

To be clear – and I’ve said this many times – I don’t blame Billy Mitchell for Apollo’s choice to commit suicide. I believe that sort of thing should only be considered in cases where the intention to compel is obvious. The truth is, like a moth to a flame, Apollo had a habit of inciting unnecessary blowback in pointless feuds with other gamers and YouTube commentators. The only person responsible for Apollo’s decision was Apollo himself. However, with that said… I’ve seen those texts from Billy. I have no doubt that Billy didn’t care what happened to Apollo, except to the extent that certain outcomes would make himself look bad.

WHAT DID KARL DO?

And here’s where we start to get into the specifics of Billy Mitchell’s lawsuit against Karl Jobst. But this is also where we run into a problem, because we don’t have that many confirmed specifics to offer. Covering the lawsuit against Twin Galaxies in California was easy; all the court filings were public! Y’all thought I was some mad genius when half the time I was just trodding through like a hung over paralegal going “Fuuuck, alright, guess I’ll just say what this pdf says and call it news”. (As for the mad genius bit, I can neither confirm nor deny.) But unfortunately, Australian courts are way more opaque, denying me the ability to simply track the motions and evidence and cite it to a public source. Meanwhile, although Karl has commented on his ongoing case more than most defendants do, he hasn’t gone into effusive specifics of the details being litigated.

Here’s what we do know:

On May 26, 2021, five months after Apollo’s passing, Karl Jobst published a video titled “The biggest conmen in video game history strike again!” This video discussed lawsuits filed by both Billy Mitchell and Todd Togers. In the Billy portion of the video, Karl offered his first public comments on Apollo Legend’s tragic suicide. Here was that passage from Karl’s video, as it was originally published:

[Billy] also sued YouTuber Apollo Legend for one million dollars. I haven’t spoken about this publicly, but this lawsuit ultimately ended with Apollo giving in, and settling with Mitchell. He was forced to remove all of his videos about Mitchell’s cheating, and paid him a large sum of money. This left him deeply in debt, which required him to find extra work. But with his ongoing health issues, this was all too much of a burden, and he ultimately took his own life. Not that Billy Mitchell would ever care, though. In fact, when Billy Mitchell thought Apollo died earlier, he expressed joy at the thought. The lawsuit against Apollo was just as frivolous as the rest, and Apollo definitely would have won in court, but again, he was extremely ill and couldn’t handle the ongoing stress.

I’m gonna be honest, when I first heard this portion, I thought this was legally safe. While the terms of the settlement between Billy and Apollo were confidential, it was believed at the time that Apollo was forced to pay Billy a lot of money to end the litigation. (More on that in a moment.) Karl simply said that Apollo was left in debt, that he had ongoing health issues (which were more widely known after the suicide), that Apollo couldn’t handle the stress, and that he chose to end his own life. Oh, and Karl factually reported that Billy had texted various people making light of a premature report of Apollo’s death. What’s the problem with that?

Soon afterward, Billy – who rarely uploads to his YouTube channel – posted a five-minute video titled “Response to Karl Jobst regarding Apollo Legend”, consisting mostly of himself speaking to the camera. If I’m to be fair, I’d say this particular outing has a lower density of lies than Billy’s average declaration, though a few do still stand out. He characterized Karl’s video as being “downright loaded with false, defamatory statements”. (Oooh, that sounds like a lot! I can’t wait to hear what all of them are this week.) He refers to claims by Jobst as “demonstrably false”, but of course fails to demonstrate their falsity. In fact, of Karl’s video as a whole, Billy claimed “Nothing he said was true”, which is obviously false. Billy claims the agreement “had no long-lasting impact on Apollo’s life”, which seems to omit the very obvious impact of lost revenue from those videos Apollo was forced to give away. Billy claimed that Apollo “told people that our dispute was not among the principal problems he faced”, and yet tries to demonstrate this with a screenshot that… kinda says the opposite? (More on that screenshot later.) More importantly, Billy republished the above-cited portion from Jobst’s video, before reframing it in the most uncharitable way possible:

In the video, Jobst outright states that I drove Apollo to suicide. In his words… he may as well have just said “murder”.

The point of this video would seem to have been five-fold. First, theatrics. Second, it’s clearly a warning shot to any other YouTube commentators who may be considering covering this story. Third, Billy used it as a platform to assert a claim contrary to Jobst’s reporting:

Regardless of anyone’s opinion of me, or my dispute with Apollo, let there be no confusion. Apollo never paid me any money. I never paid Apollo any money. There was no financial transaction between Apollo and myself, ever. Apollo never even paid any legal fees of any kind.

To be clear, Billy typically has an easy poker tell. If he says “The fact of the matter is”, he’s about to tell you something he knows is not true. When he says “Without lyin’ to ya”, he’s about to tell an especially blatant and ridiculous lie. And when he looks you in the eye and sternly asserts “Let there be no confusion”, he’s usually about to vomit some of the most confounding bullshit you will ever hear.

The fourth apparent purpose of this video was to show Billy holding up a piece of paper (which could have been anything), so he could claim it was the confidential settlement and assert that it, in his words, “proves everything I’m saying, right here and now”. Of course, we never get to see that paper. C’mon, you know how this works.

There are a couple things I should point out. First, that settlement is known to have a confidentiality clause. It’s unclear how that clause was altered by Apollo’s passing, but in the event it was still in effect, it also seems unlikely that it would entitle Billy to discuss terms of the agreement while simultaneously binding him from proving those claims. But whatever, we can just say Billy is forbidden from showing the agreement itself, and move on. Secondly, however, is that (to paraphrase) the settlement can’t “prove everything he’s saying, right here and now”. Sure, the settlement itself may not include a monetary provision. But does it prove that Apollo never paid Billy money? Does it prove there was never any financial transaction between them? How would it do this? Bank records?

But the fifth and final apparent aim of this video was to scare Karl Jobst directly. Billy tacked on a few defamatory statements of his own, calling Jobst’s supposed misreporting “very premeditated” and “very calculated”. Billy claimed Jobst’s motivation was “to rile up his viewers’ emotions”. And he concluded with this very direct threat to Karl:

I was gonna ignore Karl forever. But this? This cannot be ignored. I plan to respond the way that everybody anticipates for me to respond. And Karl? Expect me.

Yes, the guy who sent a concerns notice over a mere mention of him, and would later go on to send another over a meme, is totally above it all, and was just gonna ignore anything Karl said or did.

While people were rightfully skeptical of Billy’s retort, questions began being raised as to where Karl’s assertion of a financial settlement came from, and whether the claim was false as Billy was now claiming. (That’s something else we’ll get to in a moment.) In an apparent abundance of caution, Karl soon used YouTube’s edit feature to truncate that portion of the video. In this second version, that passage was shortened as follows:

[Billy] also sued YouTuber Apollo Legend for one million dollars. The lawsuit against Apollo was just as frivolous as the rest, and Apollo definitely would have won in court, but again, he was extremely ill and couldn’t handle the ongoing stress.

Clearly there were some behind-the-scenes discussions going on at that time, which I can’t speak to the specifics of. Soon afterward, the original video with the lengthier passage was restored. However, this restoration was only temporary. During this time, Karl reached out to a relative of Apollo’s, to seek confirmation of the existence of a financial payment as part of Apollo’s settlement with Billy. Apollo’s relative was able to locate a copy of the settlement paperwork among Apollo’s possessions. While a copy of that paperwork was not provided to Karl at that time, Apollo’s relative indicated their impression that the settlement, as written, did not include any obligation of financial restitution. In other words, while hard public proof is still not available, it is now believed that the earlier claim that Apollo had to pay Billy a bunch of money to end the lawsuit was untrue.

So when the claim came seriously into doubt (and not just from Billy flapping his lips), Karl made yet another revision to the contested video. You could call this the “third edit”, as it was the third time an edit was made, but you could also call it the “second edit” because two of those versions were identical. Or you could call it the “fourth edit” if you count the first version as the “first edit”. But if you did that, then you’d have to start calling Star Wars episode four “episode five”, and you’d have to figure out what order the Terminator movies occur in, and the space-time continuum would begin to unravel.

Anyway, the relevant passage from this final edit is similar to the short version above, but with a little more left intact:

[Billy] also sued YouTuber Apollo Legend for one million dollars. I haven’t spoken about this publicly, but this lawsuit ultimately ended with Apollo giving in, and settling with Mitchell. The lawsuit against Apollo was just as frivolous as the rest, and Apollo definitely would have won in court, but again, he was extremely ill and couldn’t handle the ongoing stress.

As of my writing, that video has a total of 1,308,443 views – and that’s across all three/four iterations of the video. The first and third versions which included the contested claims were only accessible for a few days. By contrast, Karl issued a factual correction as part of a later video, which as of this writing has received 2,631,128 views – over double the viewership of the video in dispute. That corrections was as follows:

Now, before I finish the video, I would like to take this opportunity to correct something that I said in a previous video. Back in May, I talked about the new lawsuits filed by Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell. In that video, I made the claim that Apollo Legend paid money to Billy Mitchell as part of their settlement. I would never make such a claim unless I had very good evidence to support my position. In response to this, Billy Mitchell released a video accusing me of lying, and claiming that no money was exchanged. He didn’t provide any evidence to back up this claim, nor did he attempt to get in contact with me to clear up any misinformation I may have had. However, I did investigate further, as I would never want to provide false information to my viewers. I reached out to a member of Apollo’s family, who graciously agreed to clarify some details. According to them, despite Mitchell’s best efforts, Apollo Legend would not pay any money, and in the final version of the settlement, there was no clause indicating that he was required to do so. Therefore, the statement I made in that video was almost certainly incorrect. I sincerely apologize for providing false information. And no matter what kind of relationship I have with Mitchell, I do not believe that it is ever justified to lie or mislead. Mitchell also claimed that I was accusing him of murder. This is certainly not the case. I do have my opinion regarding the impact of the settlement on Apollo’s decision, but ultimately, it was no one’s responsibility but his own. The only reason I mentioned it in that video was because I felt like it was important to let you know what happened, as I know many of you enjoyed his videos.

This clarification included an on-screen quote attributed to Apollo’s relative:

From what I could tell by reading the settlement agreement, there was not any money transferred.

BUT WHY DID KARL SAY THAT?

At this juncture, you may be asking yourself “Why would Karl Jobst say Apollo Legend gave Billy Mitchell money if it wasn’t true?”

And you know what? That’s a fantastic question!

And you know what else?

I’m not getting into that today!

Not because I’m trying to hide or avoid it or anything. One of the nice things about having written so much on this Billy Mitchell stuff already is, sometimes a topic comes up and I can say “I literally already wrote all about it.” (Maybe I am an evil genius after all, mwa ha ha.) When this first became a topic of contention in 2021, I wrote a TG wall post (prior to the acquisition of this perfectpacman.com domain), outlining the available evidence pointing to an undisclosed monetary component to the confidential settlement:

https://www.twingalaxies.com/ersatzcats/wall/9463/more-info-on-the-apollo-legend-billy-mitchell-settlement

In short, the U.S.S. Mitchell is one very leaky ship. Frequently, they’d drop predictions (that Guinness had agreed to reinstate Billy, that Apollo had reached out to Billy to settle), which sounded outlandish at the time, but were later revealed to have been privately true. None of these Team Billy knuckleheads was clairvoyant, of course; they were just getting the inside scoop from Billy and his son. Among these prescient insights was that Apollo had paid a very large sum of money as part of the settlement. Given that we now believe there was no financial settlement, it seems likely Billy and/or Junior themselves were planting this narrative. Of course, it’s highly ironic if Billy’s now claiming to be defamed by a narrative he himself was promoting.

There’s an interesting thing about defamation law – and to my knowledge, this is true basically everywhere you go. If you can demonstrate sufficient basis for making the claims you did, and that you took reasonable steps to avoid inaccuracies and to minimize damage from any errors, then your alleged “defamation” is not actionable. You are allowed to make the occasional mistake, especially when reporting on public figures; if not, nobody could report on anything. Or, as I put it in that TG post:

[If] Billy Mitchell said, with a sense of sincerity, “Yes, I fucked a goat while dressed up like Raggedy Andy,” and if I then subsequently reported that Billy Mitchell fucked a goat while dressed up like Raggedy Andy, I would not liable for defamation, even if the claim ultimately turned out to be false.

Anyway, if you want to know more about why folks thought Apollo gave Billy money, you now know where to find it. (If you don’t want to register a TG account, you can read it here on the Wayback Machine, although that archive lacks the edits I added after Karl’s update.) I’ll review that evidence again if and when it becomes part of the trial this week. Until then, we’re gonna move on.

THE PROBLEMS WITH BILLY’S CASE

“Well, it’s cut and dry then, isn’t it? Karl reported something about Billy that was untrue. Big time defamation, if ever I heard it!”

Not so fast, my pretend naysayer! Billy may have been eager to take Karl to court, but he really didn’t think this one through. Let’s go over some details.

First, it’s not defamation to say Apollo Legend paid Billy Mitchell a bunch of money, even if it’s factually untrue. An important element of defamation is that it, you know, defames the victim. If I went around telling people you won a new car on the Price Is Right when you did not, I would be a liar, and you might get annoyed with me when everyone asks you for a ride, but it would not be “defamation”, because that would do nothing to sully your identity. Now, one could say this is contextually arguable in this case, since Karl discussed the settlement in the context of Apollo’s later suicide. But people are certainly within their right to take presented facts (along with believed-to-be-facts), and come to their own conclusions. That’s not the fault of Karl. This is why, when Billy did his response video, he had to so outlandishly exaggerate what Karl had said. Without that misrepresentation, there’s no case.

But let’s say you wanted to take the interpretation most favorable to Billy, at least in terms of his ability to win this present defamation lawsuit. Let’s pretend Karl instead said the following: “This settlement destroyed Apollo financially, which required him to find extra work. But with his ongoing health issues, this was too much of a burden, and he ultimately took his own life.” Most of that is actually verbatim from the original video, except I removed the claim about a financial pay-out – which again, is not “defamation” in isolation – and added explicit attribution. “Billy’s the reason this guy’s life spiraled out of control.” And yet, in making this adjustment, the underpinning claim actually becomes more true (and thus less liable). Apollo lost a lot of future money when he had to take down those lucrative videos, which were still racking up views and revenue years later. Additionally, Apollo’s entire career as a highly successful YouTuber was decimated, and while his drama with others may have contributed to him ceasing active video production, it would be foolish to think his very public capitulation to Billy (after his very public repudiation of Billy) contributed heavily to this. Sure, in the details, it’s a difference of active debt and loss of income, but the underlying imputation remains the same. Either way, Apollo would have had to find other work which perhaps he was physically or spiritually unable to sustain.

Getting back to Billy’s dramatic response video, that was another ill-advised move. In suing someone for defamation, his position before the court basically has to be that the statements at issue significantly damaged his reputation. But Billy’s behavior demonstrates the opposite. He took the allegedly offending portion from Karl’s video, and signal-boosted it. If someone made nasty claims about me, I might respond if I felt people were taking those claims seriously, but I would certainly not do so in a way that elevates those claims. Billy’s video was not the response of someone who wants the damage to his reputation to go away. It was, however, the kind of thing an unhinged litigant who just wants to punish his critics with lawfare might do, in the hopes of dramatically burning his legal threats into everyone’s memory.

Even worse, Billy’s vid contains a truly stupefying unforced error. As I alluded to earlier, Billy included a screenshot of a portion of a conversation between Apollo and Billy’s con-artist friend, Triforce, who Apollo reached out to to help broker a settlement. In case it’s hard to read, Apollo said the following:

The lawsuit has definitely raised my stress levels but I have a lot else going on.

Billy presented this as though it validates his claim that Apollo “told people that our dispute was not among the principal problems he faced in life”. Of course, this doesn’t exactly validate that claim, now does it? In fact, it seems to confirm, in Apollo’s own words, that Billy’s lawsuit is adding to his stress.

So if we can say that the lawsuit added to Apollo’s stress… and if we can say that the fallout of the settlement added to his stress… and if we can say Apollo’s demonstrable loss of income as a result of that settlement added to his stress… where exactly is the “defamation”?

We’ve already mentioned Billy’s mistake of suing someone in a venue where the loser pays costs. But Billy has also made the mistake of suing too many people at once. He went all in on his defamation lawsuit against Jace Hall’s Twin Galaxies. He said many, many times that various losses and injuries (including his hernia, lol) were specifically caused by statements made by Twin Galaxies. That may have worked great in that case, but he can’t now suddenly claim those same losses were as a result of Karl’s videos.

And the logistics issue has only gotten worse for Mister Mullet. Eventually, he was able to find a pair of Australian lawyers in distant Cairns willing to take on this doomed defamation case. Whether the firm Miller Bou-Samra took the case on contingency or simply collected a paycheck, we may never know. However, when things predictably went south (har har), that firm bailed on him. No, they didn’t just drop him as a client. That firm self-immolated. Leeanne Bou-Samra was working for some other firm before disappearing yet again, while Robert Miller just noped out of his entire profession lmaoooooo. I mean, sure, a dude’s gotta retire at some point, but my understanding is, lawyers will typically play out their current cases, or will at least find replacement representation for remaining clients. Billy was able to cajole another firm – Bennett and Philp – into taking up his cause.

Meanwhile, unlike the Mighty Mister Tash, I haven’t gotten to see Karl’s firm of Mills Oakley in action. All I know is, they’re supposed to be among the best (and most expensive) firms in Australia. Let’s hope I have some nice words for them in the coming days.

Getting back to the case itself, here’s where things get really spicy! You see, Australia likes to do things a little differently. In the land down undah, there’s an additional legal defense against defamation claims known as “contextual truth”.

Basically, it’s not actionable for you to get a given claim wrong, as long as its sufficiently outweighed by the claims you got correct. Billy’s problem here is, his reputation was already soiled before Karl even began his reporting on Billy’s story. Specifically, Billy was already revealed to have cheated to achieve his celebrated Donkey Kong scores, and he had already been banned by Twin Galaxies for cheating – but not before hatching a bizarre plot to muddy the dispute with fake evidence. Add in the fact that Billy tries to bully people with lawsuits, and that he had sent text messages to various individuals expressing glee at premature reports of Apollo Legend’s death, and one gets an idea of how badly Billy’s shine had faded prior to the summer of 2020. Note that it seems Billy is contesting each of these claims, because of course he is.

While I do present myself as an expert on the evidence in these Billy cases (minus the technical expertise needed to verify some of the more hardcore technological assertions), and while I have journalistic familiarity with U.S. law, I certainly do not present myself as an expert on Australian law. If you want to know more about the contextual truth defense, you’ll have to seek out the people who do have that knowledge. Still, this defense sounds like amazing fun, and I wish we had it in the States. I’d love to roll up into court and be like “Members of the jury, Billy’s reputation was so trash even before I wrote anything, that nothing I could have possibly said would have made it any worse.”

As I said, the publicly available paperwork for this case is sparse. However, the following two rulings – one from Cairns in 2022, and one from Brisbane in 2023 – offer some insight as to what will be argued at trial:

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Legal-Billy-vs-Karl-2022-08-19-ruling.pdf

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Legal-Billy-vs-Karl-2023-11-29-ruling.pdf

And this is where the case branches out beyond whether Karl’s statement about the Apollo settlement was untrue, whether Karl had a valid basis to make that claim, and whether Billy suffered harm because of that specific video. Suddenly, with the defense of “contextual truth”, all this other shit is on the table, too. Billy gets to be asked about his cheated Donkey Kong scores again. He gets to be asked about being banned by Twin Galaxies – a fact he is apparently denying. Billy gets to be asked about his wacky plot to fake evidence. (I know, I know, “Which one?”) And who knows what else is going to come up along the way.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

Meanwhile… we have some late-breaking news stateside. Billy’s U.S. lawyer Anthony Ellrod has filed new motions in the Twin Galaxies case in California:

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Legal-Billy-vs-TG-2024-09-12-Billy-Motion-to-enforce-settlement.pdf.pdf

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Legal-Billy-vs-TG-2024-09-12-Billy-Motion-to-seal-enforce.pdf.pdf

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Legal-Billy-vs-TG-2024-09-12-Billy-Minute-order-enforce.pdf.pdf

Gotta be honest, this is coming in late, and I want this update out ASAP, so I’m not going to do a full ersatz_cats dissection of these filings at this exact moment. It does appear Ellrod is referencing the confidential settlement between Billy and TG, which means more redaction. But it’s safe to say, this has something to do with the trial beginning in Brisbane. Notice how, from the looks of it, ol’ Boris cried to the court for an emergency hearing to get an “ex parte” application on this heard immediately. (“Ex parte” means “We can move this along without the other party present.)

You are all gonna laugh so hard when I spell this out in another update later this week. For now, it seems Tony’s plan has failed. The motion was not decided by Judge Wendy Chang. It was decided by some other judge named Bruce Iwasaki. And he basically told Ellrod “Sure bro, I’ll hear your motion, like over a week from now after it won’t matter”. LMAOOOOOOOOOOO

AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY HE RESTED

Watch this site for further updates all this week. I can’t say for sure right now when I’ll get each daily update onto the site. Be advised, if you’re in the U.S., you can expect odd hours, like me talking about what “happened” on Monday at 2am Monday morning. Also note that, while the whole trial is currently scheduled for six days (and may run longer), the sixth day is slated for some time in October. I guess in Australia they like to break trials up into portions, just to be different.

At this point, I can’t tell you that I’m unbiased and impartial as to how this case should end, nor should you expect impartial reporting from me. Billy Mitchell is a proven cheater, he has told more lies than I could possibly count (including in sworn testimony), and he has put so many people through Hell with frivolous lawsuits aimed at silencing his critics. And his claims against Karl in this case specifically have no merit, and deserve to be dismissed. But until now, Billy has always managed to weasel out of real consequences, by exhausting defendants, or forcing settlements, or filing appeals. This is the first time he will actually have to defend his nonsense in a court of law, to a “finder of fact” (in this case, a judge). Somehow, I don’t think this is going to end well for him.

A massive “Thank you” to some folks who made all of this possible; you know who you are.

Stay tuned.