Karl Jobst versus Billy Mitchell: The fallout roundup (part 3)

by ersatz_cats

Let me give you all some free advice:

Never promise anything.

You know what happens when you promise things? Shit happens! That’s what! And a “two-part” series you thought would be an easy 1-2-3 skip down Sesame Street becomes a three-part, year-long grind, and all you get for it is “news” from several months ago lmao. Though I guess my four updates on Karl Jobst’s newer defamation lawsuit against Billy Mitchell in Florida could be considered an extension of this “fallout roundup” series, as they very much embody the fallout of the prior Brisbane trial. Which is what we’re here to continue discussing today.

Anyway, check out “Part 1” and “Part 2”, if you haven’t already. Let’s not waste any more time.

THE SOCIAL DUMBENING

Before we proceed, I do want to make something clear. Today, we’ll be talking as little as possible about that new lawsuit, and the specifics leading into it. Billy telling wild slander about Karl would’ve been a key feature here, and obviously it’s all highly important. But that lawsuit stuff has its own coverage now. And yes, this site will continue to report on those developments in great detail. This “fallout roundup” series is focused on covering the window of time between the Judge Barlow ruling (April 2025) and the moment Karl filed in Florida (April 2026). This may feel a bit retro at this point, but hey, I’m a retro kind of guy.

So let’s break out those hula hoops and fidget spinners, and wind the clock back to those bygone days of 2025. A period piece if you will. Billy and his son running their mouths on social media. Bankruptcy confusion and recrimination. Billy Mitchell somehow going from shunned lolcow to gloating victor, at least in some circles. And of course, back-and-forth YouTube commentary. All the things that made 2025 such a delight the first time we suffered through it.

Perusing Billy’s Twitter community from that era is a trip. There are too many genres of great tweets to even get to them all. Let’s start with some of the most blatantly dumbest shit you have ever read.

This one’s obviously bait. No one’s that dumb. And you know, if someone forced me to live in fucking Caldwell, Idaho, I’d probably waste my worthless time being an intentional idiot on the Internet, too.

This seems to be a reference to Karl’s video “The Hardest Level In Doom History Was Finally Beaten”. I wonder, which “midnight” are they referring to? Australian or American? Can’t be both! Karl’s notorious for cramming videos at the end of his sponsorship obligation window, which seems to fall on the end of the month, U.S. time. But everything has to be a bizarre conspiracy these days.

Oops, I forgot to say. You’ll definitely want to wear your stupidity safety goggles for these. They may even work this time.

“What a dunce” lmaooooooooooo

Twenty-eight likes too, oh my fucking God.

It’s Karl’s fault for not getting ABC on the phone and telling them all about his legal case he is obviously correct to not discuss in detail.

It goes on and on. There are flavors to this, too. You’ve probably seen that bit leaked from Karl’s Discord where he says like “Give me a single example that AI was ever wrong, You can’t”. The most obvious sarcasm in the entire history of humanity. Only an unmitigated buffoon would interact with that remark as if it were serious, right?

You get the idea. We’re not dealing with the sharpest tools in the shed, here. But of course, not all of Billy’s followers are total morons. Many are just garden variety suckers. They seemed to have this vision of Billy Mitchell swimming around in a giant vat of Karl’s money like he was Scrooge McDuck:

Obviously these people don’t like Karl, for whatever their reasons. And you can not like whoever you want, I guess. Still, these ass-kissers seem to have gotten the idea that Billy’s success is somehow also their own success.

Hmmmm… I wonder how that house thing is going.

Of course, many of these clowns get their cues from Billy himself… or at least who they seem to think is Billy himself. As we discussed in “part 1”, it’s mostly Billy Junior running their Twitter; they even both testified to this in Australia. And Junior sure does love pretending to be his dad!

Imagine if this douchebottle were a real prince. As in, born into actual crown-on-head royalty, and not his dad’s Donkey Kong hot sauce niche. He’d be historically insufferable.

And while the elder Mitchell has a decades-long track record of avoiding political talk (at least publicly) and not really being into online drama, his Zoomer son is all about those things. In “part 2”, we saw the right-wing slant among the Mitchells’ newfound social media community. Junior knows to play into that as well:

Hmmmm… I don’t think that’s intended to say “Twitch Fucker Trophy”, now is it? I would guess that’s supposed to be… you know… the other thing.

Apologies for republishing these homophobic references, but I did find someone who caught on fairly early that the person posting all this was not the old man.

There’s this thing Tommy Tallarico would always do, particularly during the Amico scandal, when asked if some feature or product would happen. His answer was always a suggestive teaser, like “Stay tuned” or “It’s on its way”. Billy is historically fond of doing this as well. It is, after all, one of the oldest tools in the bullshitter’s toolbox. (Har har!) And Junior has taken up the habit as well:

Ooooh, “Very soon”! That emphasis suggests Junior might have been thinking about their limited edition “Dragon Sauce”, which launched shortly after. It seems to be one of their standard recipes, but with a special label featuring Billy as an Australia-burninating dragon, in reference to Judge Barlow’s musings about knights and whatever. But since it’s not “Karl-themed”, and it was advertised as their “hottest sauce” available, it’s definitely not what the person was asking for.

Uh-huh. Sure, Junior. A year and a half later, still waiting on that one.

Still, you can’t say that nothing Billy or Junior preview ever comes to fruition:

MOTTE L’ÉCRU

That is the dumbest attempt at a subheader ever, and I am too in love with it to change it. I guess it means like “brown lump”? Actually, no, that’s pretty accurate.

Our next topic is Billy’s second key video from 2025, predictably titled “A Statement From Billy Mitchell: Karl Jobst (Part 2/2)”. And folks, this video is brimming with brown lumps. It’s one of the most lie-full batch of lies to ever lie in a field full of… Actually, this one’s pretty middle-of-the-road for Billy Mitchell.

That’s where I randomly paused, so that’s the screenshot I’m using, lol. Mr. William ditched the black backdrop of “Part 1” for more of what I’d call an ecru shade (although one could argue it’s more of a light taupe). To simplify things going forward, I’ll refer to the previous installment as Billy’s “black video” and this second part as his “ecru video”. Sort of like how bands have a “green album” or a “brown album”.

Note that the ecru video was released about three months after Karl’s initial “I Lost” vid, but prior to Karl’s longer and more thorough follow-up, which we’ll get to in a moment. Billy begins with a forty-second introduction where he explains that he’s done waiting for whatever else Karl has to say, and has decided that nothing Karl could say would be worth responding to. (Remember this!) With that out of the way, Billy wastes no time… re-treading the same ground he did last time?

And yes, Billy absolutely says “prelimilarily” here, because apparently he only had time or technical-know-how to do one single take:

But prelimilarily, one thing that I still have not gotten over is the fact that Karl Jobst levied all of those red joystick allegations, created all of those videos on the subject, claimed that it was the absolute smoking gun, and ultimately didn’t even attempt to use it in court, or submit it in any proceedings.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THIS A-GAIN!?!?

That was part of my response to Billy’s similar remarks on this very topic, in his sequentially previous video. I’m telling you, this man cannot let go of the fact he was busted for faking his prized Donkey Kong world records he spent all those years bragging about. It has broken his brain. He still needs you to know he didn’t really cheat lmaooooooo.

And even months later, as I began writing this, Billy (Junior) was still at it on Twitter, proudly calling their defamation lawsuit against Twin Galaxies “meritorious”. They will never stop insisting Billy’s super-highest-high-scores were totally for realsies. At least this time, in the ecru video, Billy had the sense not to loop Twin Galaxies into the “They never even attempted to use this [joystick photo] in the lawsuit” narrative, which was an obvious and blatant lie. But this still doesn’t make sense strictly in the context of the Karl lawsuit in Australia. As I explained in “part 1”, all Karl’s defense sought to do was show Billy’s reputation was spoiled from having been exposed as a cheater. The joystick stuff was not necessary, so Karl’s lawyers didn’t bother litigating it.

Ah, but it doesn’t take us long to discover why Billy is bringing up the bogus joystick again:

I’m far enough behind on writing this that you’ve surely seen these Karl-as-a-lobster prints by now. They were not introduced in this video, which was published on July 30th. YouTuber Nicholas DeOrio – who we’ll hear more from in a moment – had already received one… no, two… no… three… or…

I remain befuddled by the tendency of these YouTube commentators to gravitate toward the guy who sues YouTube commentators over sincere missteps in reporting. Do these guys watch videos of animal maulings and wistfully yearn “Ah, I wish that was me getting my testicles bitten into by that wild hyena”?

Although these prints were offered prior to Ecrupalooza, you could say this was their big rollout. And this is where that story would end. Billy wants to make some extra cash while sticking it to Karl, so he dresses him up as a lobster and sells some prints. Fair play, I guess. (Well, almost fair play lmao. Given this is now a commercial product, we’ll see how that likeness rights thing works out.)

Since we’re on the subject, I tend to suspect Billy’s hot sauce business isn’t doing so well with people who aren’t terminally online right-leaning YouTube drama culture warriors, hence both the opportunity and need to spend time and energy creating and selling contrived memorabilia. To be clear, there are many awesome content creators who sell merch of their own, so obviously that’s not the issue. Pursuing that comparison further, I won’t claim to know the ins-and-outs of content creation as a profession, but from what I hear, their direct income is largely at the whim of algorithms, site promotion, and whether a platform like YouTube decides to arbitrarily suppress their content due to heavy swearing or whatever. Ultimately, their main “product” – the content they create – is largely free to the consumer. They don’t operate a traditional buy-and-sell business model, hence the need to supplement platform revenue with sponsorships and Patreon or whatever. In contrast, condiment purveyance is as traditional as any business gets. Fucking Heinz has been doing that shit since the 1860s. That model should just be successful on its own. Gimmick flavors and specialty labels are one thing, those spice up the value of your actual product (pun always intended). But selling comedy art? What’s next? Karl-themed weight loss supplements? #KarlLostAndSoCanYou

I guess what I’m saying is, I found it interesting that these prints were sold individually, as their own money-making exercise, and not simply given away with large purchases of the product their business should be focused on. (And yes, I know, hypothetically, in some distant universe, there could exist normal customers who buy Rickey’s hot sauce without knowing who either Billy or Karl are, but the site could use a special discount code to make sure the prints go to the people who want them.)

Okay, whatever though. Billy wants to make some extra cash. I understand. Hey, the economy’s been rough for all of us. And it’s gotta be worse for Billy, after all those pricey lawyer bills failed to turn up any pots of gold. (Oh, we are definitely getting to that.) So Rickey’s and the Mitchell family are probably hard up for moolah. However, in true Billy Mitchell fashion, he wants to make sure you know that is absolutely not the case:

This isn’t about the money. This is about raising awareness of this photo to as many people as possible.

lolololol Sure, bud. You, broke ass motherfucker who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars winning a defamation lawsuit over a statement pretty much everyone had forgotten about, didn’t go to all the effort of making and individually selling these prints for money. And I’m the Shah of France.

I would kindly remind you all of the Fourth Law of Billy Mitchell: “Billy Mitchell saying something does not make it any more likely to be true than if he had said nothing at all.” And that’s actually a bit generous; in cases like this, Billy making a point to say it immediately makes the claim more suspect.

Ah, but Billy claims to bring proof, in the form of… a checkout code? No, he literally says it that way:

To prove it, I’m offering fifteen percent off this photo and all other products at RickeysSauce.com with the discount code “Karl Lobst” at checkout.

So to show that it’s not about the money, Billy’s offering a discount… off the price he himself assigned to it.

I sometimes refer to tricky rhetoric as “sleight-of-hand”, but does this even count as sleight-of-hand? This feels like if a stage magician announced “For my next trick, I will pull a plain handkerchief out of my pocket, while making this cigarette disappear.”

I’m having some fun with this, but let’s be fair. We could choose to allow for a bit of facetiousness on Billy’s part here. He knows he wants money, you know he wants money, I know he wants money, his disappointed family knows he wants money, but one could say he wants to have fun and playfully declare that this is all for some made up totally-not-money reason instead, while giving everybody the old winkey-wink, because everyone knows it is indeed about the money. And honestly, that’d be no big deal. Not everything everyone says at all times is serious. I’m obviously not above a good joke.

But I just don’t fall for that here. For one thing, that’s not Billy’s established style. One could have had the same interpretation about all the times he declared himself fucking World Emperor of Donkey Kong or whatever, right up until the moment he for-real sued a bunch of people for publishing evidence proving he wasn’t. I mean, this is Billy Mitchell we’re talking about. If he isn’t telling multiple acquaintances how earnestly he wishes the people who criticize him would literally drop dead on the street, then how am I supposed to know he’s telling a “””joke”””? Even if Billy himself, in the crevices of his narcissistic mind, truly believed this wasn’t a serious remark at the time he made it, he’s still one step away from including it in a legal declaration anyway. “I made clear that the use of Karl’s likeness was not for profit blah blah blah.” He’s not saying it to get a laugh, he’s saying it because he wants you to believe it.

We’re not even two full minutes into this circus yet.

UNDER THE BIG TAUPE

For much of his ecru video, Billy engages in one of his favorite argumentative postures: citing the marginally interested parties he successfully befuddled or bedazzled as authorities validating his bullshit. We’ve seen this before. In 2020, Billy wasted no time touting his Guinness reinstatement, describing their process using words like “long investigation” and “substantial due diligence”. It was obvious even at that time that the reinstatement was a total sham, and when court discovery later exposed his private communications with Guinness’ representatives, the whole farce was laid bare. Guinness never understood the evidence, they didn’t have access to anything the public did not, and they had no idea what was going on.

This time of course, it’s Clueless Ken Barlow – who I have no qualms about calling a “marginally interested party” – getting called up from the Billy bullpen. (And yes, Barlow will get more trashing today, if that’s your thing.) As Billy remarked:

To begin, although millions of people viewed the judgment online, I don’t feel that many people actually read the over 100 pages of judgment itself, and the discussion of Mr. Jobst’s behavior, and tendencies therein.

lol Well okay, first of all it definitely wasn’t millions of people. It’s like Billy can’t help but exaggerate every little detail. The original judgment, streamed under the channel name “QLD Courts Streaming”, was deleted soon after the verdict was read. The court also issued copyright strikes to reuploads and to commentary vids, because this case was decided by people who have no idea how YouTube works. But in one reaction vid that survived, we can see the original broadcast had an upvote score of about 550. Obviously total viewership includes people like myself who would be inclined to vote negatively, as well as folks who don’t bother with engagement buttons. But still, we’re not exactly talking White Sox versus Rockies levels of audience-drawing power.

But more to the point, I have read the entire judgment, a few times through. There are certainly ways in which Karl should have handled himself better, and speaking as an actual authority on Billy Mitchell’s lawsuits, I have discussed some of those failures previously. But I cannot take Ken Barlow’s personal assessment of Karl Jobst seriously, because he showed himself to be the most gullible motherfucker alive.

There are many examples of Barlow’s barefaced credulity, not to mention his misunderstanding of basic facts presented to him. Obviously, I’m not going to relitigate them all here. But Billy makes a point to read passages [74] and [75] in their entirety, as if they’re especially damning:

[74] and [75] are supposed to be a repudiation of Karl’s character. Note that, by pushing Barlow’s opinion of Karl in this fashion, this comes with the implication that you’re supposed to suspend your own ability to evaluate character to some baby boomer who may or may not think Amazon would cold call him to confirm his credit card information. Sure, Barlow had to sit and listen to testimony and evaluate evidence, and it is supposed to be his job to not be a sucker for con-artists. But I don’t need to tell you that some people suck at their jobs. If some judge somewhere said stupid shit like (paraphrasing) “I’m not convinced Mr Mitchell is an untruthful witness, cuz maybe he just makes lots of occasional mistakes”, or “I see no indication Mr Mitchell gives inconsistent testimony to suit the day”, or “Mr Mitchell’s scores led to controversy because he sent them by video tape,” I wouldn’t suddenly say “Gosh, maybe I was wrong about Billy. I mean, this judge thinks so!” Knowing what I know, based on incontrovertible facts and evidence, I would conclude that Billy remains an established serial liar, and that the judge in question was a naive assclown.

Similarly, I don’t need some stranger who’s seen a fraction of the evidence, and doesn’t even understand that portion he has seen, to tell me who Karl Jobst is. Sure, Barlow is entitled to his personal opinion about Karl’s demeanor on the witness stand – although, I have heard it suggested that witness evaluations based on demeanor are unreliable. But out here in the real world, that opinion isn’t any more valuable than that of any rando on the Internet who watches Karl’s videos and believes they somehow give a full picture of who he is as a person.

Lest you think I’m making some lazy, dismissive “No one knows anything about anyone” argument, I mean this specifically as counter to [74] and [75]. I discussed those passages in my review of the Barlow ruling, but here’s the crucial segment, with “that trait” being Karl’s reluctance to “admit error”:

He also demonstrated that trait in his videos about Mr Mitchell, continually calling him a cheat and asserting that his legal proceedings against others (and against Mr Jobst, in this proceeding) were frivolous, bullying and bound to be lost by Mr Mitchell.

This was a fascinating insight into Judge Barlow’s mindset. Barlow didn’t watch any of Karl’s videos, except the one that was entered into evidence. (To be more specific, no other videos were in evidence, none were cited, no facts or passages from other videos were referenced, and Barlow never claimed to have watched any.) So if you have seen those other videos, you’re already more informed than Barlow. Billy had indeed lost his other lawsuits prior to Brisbane, so I can’t fault Karl there. And “continually calling [Billy] a cheat?” What the donkey ass are you talking about? The cheating evidence is beyond overwhelming. So Karl asserting incontrovertible facts is a character flaw? What is wrong with this guy!?

It feels a bit like Braindead Barlow is addicted to television-style news, doesn’t it? Where nothing’s ever asserted, and “debates” are hosted between scientifically-sound positions on one side versus lying “skeptic” grifts on the other. God forbid any honest journalist simply tell you “That guy right there, yes him, that guy is totally full of crap. You don’t have to waste any more time pondering that one.” Thus, Karl’s brand of journalism is “doubling down” or “refusing to admit error” or whatever.

Like Guinness before him, Barlow didn’t really give a shit. If he did, he would have easily seen “Oh, this Mitchell guy who sues all these people who criticize him and who keeps changing his stories, his testimony is not trustworthy.” At least with Guinness, you could understand why they wanted a tedious lawsuit about their poorly worded statement to go away. Barlow was a sucker purely for love of the game.

ECRU’D INTEREST

I promise I’m not going to spend much more time rehashing all this like an old curmudgeon (at least not today, lol), but I do want to make sure the important points from the ecru album are covered. The whole video, unsurprisingly, is Billy directionlessly badmouthing Karl, with this being the level of intellectualism and sincerity we’re dealing with. We see that again, when Billy purports to add context to something Karl said in his initial “I Lost” video, at about 10:00:

After I removed the claim from my video, we responded to Billy’s lawyers, advising them that the segment was removed, and that I would be issuing a retraction. Billy said this was not sufficient, and in the response from Billy’s lawyer, they stated that proceedings were necessary.

During that segment, Karl shows clips from attorney-to-attorney communications. Note that I’m not privy to the totality of these documents, especially what hasn’t been shared in public videos. And I don’t necessarily trust whatever Billy shows on his screen. So I’m not going to get too far into the weeds of this back-and-forth, the way Karl himself might. However, at about 9:10 in Ecrulectric Boogaloo, Billy makes the following curious assertion:

In his “I Lost” video, Mr. Jobst claims that he offered to retract the allegations, but that I said I would sue anyway. That’s not true. And the documents shown by him in that video do not support what he said.

Okay, first of all, let’s be clear about one thing. Billy was totally intending to sue the moment he caught Karl with a factual inaccuracy he felt he could spin as legally meaningful. This isn’t a stretch. Remember that video Billy did in June 2021, where he told Karl to “Expect me”? Billy’s own reply (later pinned) made clear that any forthcoming retraction would be insufficient:

So… He’s unaware of a retraction… buuuuuuuut… he’s going to sue “either way”? Of course, Billy doesn’t say that, he just says it, so he can turn around and say “I never saaaaaiiiiid I said that.”

Billy then stresses the difference between a “retraction” and an “offer to make amends”, which Billy calls “effectively a settlement offer”. Two seconds of Google suggests that is the case. And among the document shuffle, Billy asserts that Karl’s then-forthcoming retraction was not part of a proper “offer to make amends”. Sure, whatever. One could argue that this makes Karl’s eventual retraction – tacked on to a Dark Souls video as it may have been – more sincere, as it was not offered conditionally. Karl simply corrected the record of his own accord. At any rate, Billy frames this all in a way as to make you believe Karl never offered to settle the case (as heard at 11:10):

Bottom line, I told Mr. Jobst that I would proceed with the lawsuit unless he settled the case, but he chose to proceed with litigation.

It happened again! Billy doesn’t say “Karl never attempted to settle the lawsuit.” He just wants you to think it.

But we know Karl offered to settle the lawsuit. Karl would later show the offer himself, in his forthcoming video (at about 29:00):

And Billy knew this all along. And apparently, Billy never made any counter-offer of his own. Again, I’m not trying to barge into this documentary disco when I don’t have all the material myself. But this point doesn’t seem to be in contention by either party.

Billy wanted you to think Karl refused to settle and insisted on proceeding to litigation.

But it was Billy who refused to settle and insisted on proceeding to litigation.

Hmmmm…..

In my new litigation coverage, I’ve identified five “Laws of Billy Mitchell”. It’s just stuff we’ve known, but turned into a fun, handy list. There are so many more that could be added, and I told myself new christenings would only happen as the necessity of my writing arrives. But the ecru video has hereby prompted this Sixth Law of Billy Mitchell:

When Billy Mitchell makes an accusation, it is secretly a confession.

I know, not an original notion. But this ecru video is full of such confessions.

The remainder of Billy’s runtime consists of him railing against what he frames as Karl’s various failures in his handling of the overall situation. (You know, the difficult situation Billy initiated.) I won’t lie, if you strip this stuff of its context, there is some truth to the words Billy says here. Karl should have issued a better correction. Karl should not have relied on the fact Billy prompted third parties including attorneys to reach out as a basis for saying that Billy never attempted to contact him. And we’ll get to one more item in a moment.

But when these criticisms come from Billy Mitchell of all people, they’re laughably pathetic. It feels like getting a stern lecture on civil ethics from the fucking Hamburglar.

Like, okay. Karl put his apology at the end of an unrelated Dark Souls video. Fine. Where’s your apology, Billy? Where’s your apology for making hobbyist scorekeepers waste countless hours chasing down your lies about Donkey Kong tapes you knew all along were bullshit? Or your apology to all the conventions over the years who paid you appearance fees on the basis of lies? Where’s your mea culpa for stabbing your former supporter Steve Kleisath in the back? Where’s your apology to Carlos Pineiro for lying him into assisting you, and then browbeating him into signing a “retraction” you both knew was bogus? Where’s your apology to Jace Hall for making him spend gobs of money litigating the wholly justified removal of Donkey Kong scores he could not reinstate? Was that apology at the end of a Dark Souls video, Billy? Was it anywhere? Have you ever apologized for anything? Prior to your “dark humor that I regret” farce in Brisbane court, did you ever publicly acknowledge how inappropriate it was to openly joke about wanting Apollo Legend to suddenly die, and how happy it would make you if he did? Did you ever proactively address this, in any way? Or were you only “regretful” when it was opportunistic? Do you regret any of the life-altering lawsuits you levied against innocent people, such as the one faced by Jeff Harrist in the final year of his life? And where’s your apology for all the wild slander you made up about David Race who had been trying out of the goodness of his heart to defend you?

At about 8:40, we see the Sixth Law of Billy Mitchell in action:

These are all examples of the lengths that Mr. Jobst will go to in order to not concede any fact that opposes his desired narrative. He will warp semantics and documentary evidence to fit whatever he wants his audience to believe. He doesn’t care about the truth. He only cares about the wrecking of people’s lives to generate money and clout for himself, and to satisfy his malicious personal vendettas.

Uh-huh. Right. Except for the name, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

As an amusing aside, if you watch these segments, each one is interrupted with an extreme number of subtle cuts. I counted eleven cuts in that brief passage alone. The upcoming quote consists of eleven more, sometimes isolating single words. Even when Billy Mitchell’s just sitting there lying he can’t help splicing lmaooooooooooo. Aside from showing screenshots and video segments, this seems to be the only editing that was done. I realize frequent cuts are a popular style with the kids these days, but this doesn’t land as a stylistic choice as opposed to necessity. Is Billy licking his lips that much between words? Maybe he should have taken a cue from Karl and just thrown some game footage on the screen or something.

At any rate, this is how Billy wraps up his Karl slander:

If I spent all my time, if I responded to every claim that Mr. Jobst makes, every semantic tailored argument, every selectively cropped screenshot, every convenient omission, I would be doing videos forever. This is never going to end. That’s because Mr. Jobst doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about controlling the public narrative to suit his personal vendettas.

Every accusation is a confession.

And yes, if you read the confession for what it is, I guess this means I’ll be writing this stuff forever.

Naturally, Billy concludes his ecru opus by pitching his not-about-the-money lobster prints for sale one more time.

INVESTIGATE THIS!

When researching social media commentary on Billy, occasionally I stumble on people talking about me and my writing. Believe it or not, I don’t seek out what people say about me. Hell, I couldn’t even search for it if I wanted to, since half the time I find some Billy fan boy lying about me, they can’t even spell “ersatz_cats” right lmao.

Who the fuck, indeed. I figure, if people want me to see their feedback, they’ll post it here – unless I’ve banned them from commenting for good reason lol. But as I said, I find it anyway in the course of my research. Maybe some day I’ll collect some amusing musings from folks, but one of my favorite reactions I see goes basically along these lines:

I like ersatz_cats’s work. I just wish he didn’t glaze Karl Jobst all the time.

Seldom am I given specifics of exactly what aspect of my “glazing” of Karl they object to. Usually, if they have to articulate any one specific grievance, it’s the whole “Karl misled everyone about the lawsuit” bit. They’re not satisfied that I explored exactly that question in great detail and determined (to paraphrase myself) “No, Karl didn’t mislead you. He made clear on multiple occasions the lawsuit related to Apollo Legend, which immediately put it out of the sphere of strict cheating claims. Karl didn’t discuss particulars of the lawsuit he was defending for obvious lawyerly reasons. If you believed Karl talking incessantly about Billy’s other lawsuits over cheating were an indication his own lawsuit was the same, I understand and sympathize, but it’s not Karl’s fault you leapt to that assumption. And his defense GoFundMe was accurate and said nothing of what people ascribe to it now.” I can’t say this went over especially well with some people, but let’s be honest, that’s usually how things go when facts confront feelings.

Aside from that, I’m not sure what these folks want. I guess they’re just angry at Karl, and they want me to join in and validate that? What else do you want me to tell you, bro? Do you want me to agree that your dead dog really is waiting for you in heaven? That your gambling strategy is super-clever, and not a total waste of your time and money? Do you need me to tell you “You don’t need makeup babe, you look beautiful just the way you are”?

More times than I could possibly count – like, at least five times – I’ve been accused of blindly defending Karl, as if I don’t have a valid basis for the positions I’ve taken. I defend Karl because he cares about the truth, and because he is and continues to be correct 99% of the time – a faaaarrrr better batting average than his most vocal critics. I haven’t felt the need to lay into Karl about many things, even when I’ve disagreed with him. The only video of his I thought was total ass was his 2021 vid about “tool-assistance” in Minecraft. But like, who cares? Karl has an opinion, I have an opinion, and they diverge. Is it critically important that I say so? Even restricting ourselves to the things relevant to the Billy Mitchell stuff, I was blunt about Karl’s mistakes after the Australia verdict, but I guess for some folks that’s not enough. If you couldn’t tell from the totality of my writing, I don’t have a lot of respect for the people who think “journalism” means treating the unrepentant lying con-artist who sues everyone, and the YouTube journalist who tries his best to accurately report on the bully and occasionally fails to be perfect, with the same gloves. (“Treating”? “Gloves”? I don’t know, I’m bad at analogies.)

But indeed, everyone has something to criticize. So for all your frothing Karl-haters out there, I guess this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

This was the introduction to a November 2023 legal declaration signed by Karl Jobst for inclusion in Twin Galaxies’ defense against Billy Mitchell’s lawsuit in California. Seems so long ago now, doesn’t it? As you may or may not recall, there was this whole fracas at the time over whether TG had improperly withheld the FAMB photos, pursuant to a lazily worded discovery request from the Billy camp. Billy’s lawyers were using a statement from one of Karl’s videos to suggest this was the case. Also, a lying con-artist named Triforce was trying to tell the court that Karl only disparaged him because TG’s attorney, the Mighty Mister Tash, had prompted him to do so, which of course was total horseshit. You can refresh yourself on all those deets here, if you wish. It’s not important to what we’re talking about today.

Okay. So Karl’s a professional YouTuber. That’s true. And he’s an investigative journalist. Also true. What’s the big deal?

Aw, fuck me.

This was tweeted during the immediate aftermath of the Jirard Khalil “Open Hand Foundation” charity scandal, which Karl and fellow YouTuber Mutahar Anas exposed. First of all, setting aside the prior context, this statement is kinda meaningless on the face of it. I guess it’s to say “Don’t expect me to take this shit too seriously, I’m just an entertainer”? Alright, I guess. But Karl doesn’t strictly say he’s not an investigative journalist either, just that he has “literally never” called himself one. Even if that last part were the case, is the notion that he doesn’t claim the title supposed to have value? There’s a subtle note of what I’d call Scott Adams brainrot to the premise as well. Does Karl think we were wrong to assume a standard of investigative journalistocity? But he doesn’t exactly say that either. Are his motivations secret super-cryptic riddles only he can understand? Why not simply skip to the part where he clarifies whether he considers his work “investigative journalism”?

And I’m not sure why this was necessary in the first place. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Karl and Muta were abso-fucking-lutely right about Jirard “The Completionist” and their charity. OHF was hoarding money while claiming it was being actively donated to organizations they in fact had no involvement with. Jirard was knowingly lying for donations, and it deserved to be called out. Everything that followed was the result of the Khalils mishandling the consequences of their own malfeasance. Karl also lost money covering this by foregoing a sponsor, which would’ve been included for any other topic. Some people fixated on a few silly details from Karl’s video, like the e-signature thing. There’s no need to disclaim journalistic standards over meaningless mistakes like that.

But the reason this comes up now is because, after the Brisbane verdict, people noted the incongruity between Karl’s tweet and his signed declaration. I admittedly had never noticed it when it happened in late 2023. Of course the Mitchells amplified this in their ongoing smear campaign against Karl, both on Twitter and in Billy’s ecru video. And Karl’s other critics seized on it as well, as if to say “See? See? Here we caught him dead to rights. This guy’s been lying to you all along.”

Much like the lasagna Garfield has “literally never” eaten, there are layers to this. Karl didn’t say “I prefer not to think of myself as an investigative journalist” or “As a rule, I don’t call myself an investigative journalist.” Those both have easy outs. As a rule, I don’t star in underground fecal fetish pornos filmed via Game Boy Camera stop-motion photography, but if you ever catch me doing it, you can’t call me a liar now can you?

Instead, Karl said the exact wrong thing. It would’ve been so much easier to say something utterly forgettable. There was a teeny tiny bullseye for Karl to be factually materially provably deadass wrong about whatever mostly inconsequential thing he was trying to say, but man, he nailed it. And obviously, this wasn’t helped by the linguistic inflation where literally every assertion must be prefaced with “literally”, including literally this literal example. “Never”? Bad. “Literally never”? Double bad with cheese and bacon.

Ordinarily, this is where I’d stop. I have every right to razz Karl a bit for the blunder, like I did with Mr. Tash and his “Rasta” comments toward Triforce. Neither Karl nor Tash are bad people. I don’t consider this a “lie” because I don’t perceive an intent to deceive. There wasn’t a malicious plan to tell a provable falsehood about an inane detail easily countered by a public document. This was just a mistake. Karl forgot about the legal declaration, which he may not have even authored and/or edited entirely himself. Yes, he is responsible for signing it, and I’m not arguing otherwise. One way or another, it was a brain fart. I’ve said and done dumb shit, too. So have you.

What rubs me the wrong way is not the mistake itself, which I could make fun of for a bit and move on. The problem is that, in my opinion, Karl did not properly own it. And that’s why I feel compelled to delve into this a bit more deeply than otherwise.

In October of last year, many months after this mistake was publicly identified, Karl did eventually discuss it at…

Wait for it…

Waaaaaait…

A bit longer…

Almost there…

The three-hour mark of his four-hour mega-video “The Completionist is a Lying Con Artist”. In short, Jirard dishonestly misrepresented Karl’s words in multiple ways, giving Karl the opportunity to be a champ in contrast. Meanwhile, Karl finally clarified that, even though he doesn’t generally call himself an investigative journalist, he “may actually be one” “according to many definitions” (and also according to whoever wrote his old Wikipedia bio). Karl then, at long last, addressed the mistake itself:

In December of 2023, I tweeted that I’ve literally never called myself an investigative journalist. This was incorrect, because the month prior, I had labeled myself as one in my declaration in the Twin Galaxies lawsuit. This was both a factual inaccuracy, and a mistake I made, because I forgot what I had said in that statement. But it was also unnecessary hyperbole. The point of my tweets weren’t to suggest that what I say is untrue. It was to point out the stupidity of saying that I make my YouTube videos to make money, and therefore what I’m saying is unreliable. Of course I make YouTube videos for money! It’s my job. I don’t get paid for the hundreds of hours I spent investigating Jirard and the Open Hand Foundation. I get paid to make entertaining videos. And Jirard defenders, including Jirard himself in this very video, are trying to use the fact that YouTube is my job to discredit my reporting, which is nonsense. What’s interesting is that even when Jirard can point to a legitimate mistake I made, where I claimed I didn’t do something when I clearly did, he can’t help himself but to include his own lies on top of it.

I mean… It’s something? The words themselves aren’t bad. I can’t say he didn’t address it, buried late in four hours of him utterly trashing the guy this all related to in the first place (although the trashing itself was absolutely justified). But I think this one deserved more than a “I’ll acknowledge the mistake, but only several months later when I can place it deep amidst the context of some other douchebag failing to acknowledge their mistakes.”

Unfortunately, I can’t totally deny that this mistake, benign as it may have been, can have implications. For instance, Karl says he never saw the truly awful stuff from the infamous RWhiteGoose Discord we discussed in “part 2”. Okay. But did Karl “literally never” see any of it? Because if that’s the case, “literally never” would seem to mean he did as recently as two months ago. Has Karl misrepresented something in the same way, which we never caught? I mean, Karl can’t ever use the words “I’ve literally never” again without immediately drawing this comparison.

And this is why I felt, and still feel, that Karl should have owned this mistake more directly and publicly. You’re allowed to fuck up things from time to time. I’ve done it too. It’s not good, but it’s going to happen. Just be accountable when it does. And for me, that’s where Karl actually failed here. He just went silent for months, like he was pretending it never happened.

To me, that says something – something I don’t like. Those actions say that he thinks he doesn’t have to be accountable for literal misrepresentation, even if accidental. It’s not our job to assume a given content creator wouldn’t lie, nor is it our job to defend people who don’t defend themselves.

I don’t want you to mistake this as any kind of personal thing. Karl and I have both been in the figurative trenches on this Billy Mitchell stuff for years now – with him obviously putting more on the line than I ever have. He doesn’t owe me anything, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be anyone else’s business. And Karl certainly doesn’t owe the Completionist anything kinder than a kick in the dick for all the lies and recriminations.

This is about all of you. The people who watch and like and recommend Karl’s videos. The people who have stuck by him during this most difficult chapter of his. It is my personal opinion that he owed all of you better than this.

Once again, I would love to leave it at that and move on. But I realize the fact that I of all people am saying this raises a few questions, which if unanswered could lead to some wild assumptions. So I’ll try to answer these the best I can:

“Holy Hell! Where is this coming from?”

Well, it’s not really “coming from” anywhere. I’m sure all of you reading this have forgotten, but I slipped the following remark into the introduction to this series a year ago:

On a more serious note, you also will probably be genuinely shocked by one thing in particular I’ll have to say – although, you’ll have to wait for part two for that.

As you know, “part two” became “part three”, lol. And that was written before Karl’s big Completionist response, at a time when he had literally never addressed this. (See what I did there lol?) But one way or another, some variation of this was on its way. I’ve defended Karl on many things. I wasn’t going to defend this one.

“ersatz, it’s just a small mistake. Is this really that big a deal?”

It might not be? I’ll leave that up to the reader. Most Karl fans honestly would just not remark on it, the way you might cheer your football team’s best player without dwelling on his bizarre off-the-field beliefs. That’s the privilege of not being on the spot. But I’m in the unique position where I’m writing about this whole saga, soup-to-nuts, in detail. I knew I’d be writing a full breakdown of Billy’s “Response to Karl” videos, and sure as shit, I knew he was going to bring it up. I can’t exactly pretend the bad thing didn’t happen, now can I? Some words had to go here. These are the words I have chosen.

“Karl was right not to bother addressing this point, being pushed by bad faith actors, at a time when they’re just looking for something to smear him with.”

This is a totally fair point to consider. And while I don’t speak for Karl, nor am I a mind-reader, I would guess this is deep down why he eschewed this topic for months. It would have fed into the bad faith shitstorm, which I can believe was difficult to endure. To be crystal clear, I’m not so naive that I think Karl has to issue a formal apology for every little slip-up, or every silly Discord joke, or every contrived controversy irrational fuckwits on the Internet want to blow out of proportion. (As I sarcastically remarked of the bad actors discussed in part two, “Gosh, I wonder why Karl doesn’t try to appease these people.”) You don’t have to apologize to assholes who would never apologize to you, no matter how much they want to see you do so. Again, this is about Karl’s responsibility to his reasonable fans. I think this faux pas was too on-the-nose, in a non-joke context, carrying too many implications relating to personal trust. It doesn’t have to be a whole-ass vid about it. A standalone tweet would’ve been fine. There has to be space to say “There’s a lot of wild slander about me. Much of it is outright lies. I intend to address that in a video when the time is right. But I did screw this particular thing up, and I’d like to take accountability for that right away. No excuse, I just need to do better.” I have to believe there’s room to say that. I found space to say what I’m saying now, as much as I’d rather be saying something else.

“Does this mean we shouldn’t trust Karl?”

It’s your choice to make. It always was. The reason I still trust Karl is because, to me, this was clearly a small mistake mixed with a bit of poor judgment. It’s not a pattern. And I don’t expect it to become one.

There was something else I seeded in part one: The notion that you do still have to watch the people you trust. If a video looks like it’s earnestly trying to convince me Karl has “A History of Dishonesty” or whatever, I’ll give it a shot. I have to. That’s the cost of prioritizing the truth over which team you’re on. Thankfully, I know enough about this saga to spot the nonsense right away. Every time, these videos attacking Karl are full of misrepresentations, ignorance, and worse. If these frothing haters found a few more items like this “investigative journalist” bit, involving topics of more consequence than “I had a brain fart about what I wrote in a document that’s public anyway”, I’d be compelled to say “Okay, I guess Karl has truth issues, and maybe I shouldn’t defend this guy so readily.” But these bozos I see, these Arkamatts and Denny Thrays, they wouldn’t recognize a good argument if it was a Mack truck heading for them on the Interstate. If they had a valid case to make about Karl, why do they so consistently have to glue it together with outright lies? They choose not to grapple with the difference between someone like Karl, who occasionally fucks things up in ways they would also promptly screw up, and a serial liar and con-artist like Billy Mitchell, who has no regard for truth whatsoever. Hell, these dumbasses even try to rehabilitate Jirard Khalil! It’s all brain worms.

I find it funny, because if I wanted, if I turned evil, I could write out a “Karl’s a bad guy” case better than these clowns I see. I don’t do this, because I don’t care to lie to you all. Karl’s obviously not the villain, so why would I tell you that he is?

“Why would you air this dirty laundry publicly, instead of addressing this to Karl directly?”

Okay, I’m having a little fun with this one. As it’s worded, that’s the kind of question LUS might pull out of his ass. “Erscat went all the way to Australia to then report on the case… And he didn’t even say ‘Hi’ to Karl Jobst. That’s kind of like, who that person is.” I still don’t know where the fuck he got that from, lmao.

But let’s assume good faith by foregoing the connotation invoked with the word “instead”. Again, I knew even before that Completionist video I’d be writing something in this space. And that was well before the new Florida lawsuit was filed. I can delicately say that, if not for that lawsuit, you would be reading other words here.

However, when there’s active litigation, I have a general rule that I don’t publicly discuss whether I communicate with specific parties to that litigation, or what we do or don’t talk about. It’s a blanket policy for everyone’s safety. Maybe one day I can say more, if anyone still gives a fuck at that time (if they even do now, lol). Instead, right here right now, I will have to ask you to trust me when I say I have handled this in what I believe to be an appropriate manner. Though I’m not perfect either. Regardless, any curiosity you may have toward this point will have to go unsatisfied for now.

“Have things changed with you and Karl?”

Oh, Hell no! At least not for me. Karl can speak for himself if he chooses. Barring further commentary, it seems he and I would disagree on this point. We’re allowed to do that. We are different people with different perspectives. Nothing else has changed. My coverage will remain unchanged. Everything will be fine… I promise.

Okay, NOW we can get back to the fun stuff.

THE FINAL* UPDATE

Billy’s ecru video was released on July 30th of last year. Way back in “part 1”, I promised to you that I would always proceed chronologically no matter what. Thus, we now arrive at Karl’s “Final Lawsuit Update” video, published on August 11th:

You may recall I assigned this as prerequisite viewing for this series. But we’re going to cover some important points anyway, because it’s a good reminder for what we’ll discuss next, and because I love this shit so much. It’s also nice being on the other side of this commentary fence for once. Usually, I’m writing these highly detailed treatises, hoping someone out there might do a summary (as some have) and use the opportunity to point to my writing and say “Go there for all the deets, I’m just picking through the good stuff.” This time I get to do the summarizing! I get to write without having to grind out new material? Gosh, it’s so refreshing, like opening the house to a gust of fresh spring air. This must be what reaction sloptubers get to feel like all the time.

All of Karl’s mea culpa “I have been in denial” stuff is frontloaded at the beginning, where it should be. I’ll circle back to some of that later, but I have little to add to Karl’s own words there. For our purposes today, the most important topic is Karl’s bankruptcy. The Australia judgment plus interest totaled $390,000 AUD. Karl was also liable for Billy’s court costs, for which Billy’s side offered to accept around $600,000 AUD. Karl agreed to this proposal, putting his total debt to Billy at about one million Aussie bucks. (Some of this comes from the written Barlow judgment, and some from private attorney communications, which Karl shows in his video.)

But surprise! Karl Jobst is not a fucking millionaire. He’s a moderately successful YouTuber, coming off a massive expensive lawsuit defense which he had to partially crowdfund. He strictly could not pay these debts. Bankruptcy was the inevitable outcome.

Among the many leaks from Karl’s semi-public Discord around this time, he did joke about his bankruptcy, referring to it as “nature’s do-over”. But Karl joshing it up with his friends is beside the point. It’s not like the judgment is a debt Karl sought out for personal gain and then refused to compensate. He didn’t borrow a million dollars from Billy Mitchell and then say “Neener neener, now I don’t have to pay you back.” The number was a figure Judge Barlow pulled out of thin air. He could have just as easily said “You owe Mr. Mitchell one spachillion rupees and a hundred-googol Chuck E. Cheese tokens.” Karl would’ve been no more capable of paying out that sum, either.

Outside of allegedly defaming Billy, Karl didn’t do anything wrong. Civilized society decided over a century ago that bankruptcy laws and debt forgiveness were preferrable to debtors’ prisons full of people whose only crime was destitution. This is just the type of situation bankruptcy legislation was designed to handle. (And yes, in Australian law, Karl’s judgment debt to Billy is dischargeable. Again, this is all by design.)

Of course, the bankruptcy initiated a process by which the money and property Karl did own were evaluated and seized by the trustee for purposes of liquidation. Karl’s family owned two houses, but much of the equity was tied up in mortgages. And lest you think those could be squeezed for more juice to satisfy Karl’s debts, Australian law gave Karl’s wife first priority to buy out Karl’s share of their jointly owned properties, which she did using her own independent funds. Karl’s YouTube channel was spared the axe in a similar way. As we glimpsed in “part 2”, this stuff seemed to upset Billy’s idiot admirers, who aren’t nearly as proficient in Australian bankruptcy law as perhaps they imagined, but it was all perfectly above board and overseen by the appointed trustee. Lastly, as pointed out in Karl’s vid, he and his wife made one final offer using her independent money, strictly in the hopes of avoiding the stigma of bankruptcy. Billy rejected even this offer, and received far less compensation as a result.

The reason I wanted to rehash this all here is, I think many people miss the most important, underlying point.

As we saw in “part 2”, the rabid, frothing Karl haters want Karl to do the stupid thing, so they can say “Look how stoopid, isn’t he stoopid?” And Karl seems to mostly disappoint them in that regard, so they have to invent pretend bullshit to fill the void, like little children who deeply love their imaginary ponies. But it’s not like the idea of bankruptcy is a mystical fucking secret. Billy Mitchell should have known this would be the outcome. Billy’s attorneys – either his first firm “Miller Bou-Samra” which evaporated halfway through the pre-trial process, or the later attorneys “Bennett and Philp” he hired for trial – should have advised him there was not a giant pot of gold waiting for him at the end of this rainbow. I mean, did it even occur to Team Billy that their own $600,000 offer for legal costs immediately became verifiable debt for Karl? To this day, even as they perhaps read these very words, do they realize they assisted Karl in executing his own bankruptcy?

As Karl alluded in the video, Billy could have sued Karl’s channel company. I’m guessing this would have significantly hurt Karl’s YouTube reach, forcing him to start over with subscribers. Instead, Billy sued Karl as an individual, then practically walked him right to the “He never has to pay me” office, and then got super upset when this Certified Billy Mitchell Plan^TM didn’t result in magic money from nowhere manifesting in his bank account.

The story here isn’t “Karl got away with one.” He made a mistake, and lost a lawsuit – which, as I’ve said before, anyone reading this is capable of doing in one way or another. Lots of lawsuits go to trial, which means many people lose cases they believed they were going to win. Like Karl, most people would have instinctively believed they had done nothing wrong, and would be inclined to fight, at least at first. And literally a-n-y-o-n-e in Karl’s ultimate position (and favorable jurisdiction) would have declared bankruptcy the same way.

The actual story here is that Billy Mitchell followed through with this entire procedure without having any clue what he was doing, or how to do it. How did he not have this bankruptcy point accounted for? How could he be so far off on what Karl’s channel actually earns? Did he do literally any research to this end at all before diving into a major international lawsuit – one which very easily could have gone against him? Did he consider any of this when he refused to settle with Karl at every step of the way? You can’t even say Billy’s satisfied with simply hurting Karl at whatever cost, because again, Karl’s channel was spared. Did he not even think to look into channel ownership? Sure, Billy got a public relations boost among some idiots on the Internet, but I don’t think they bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of condiments. If all Billy wanted was redemption from the cheating scandal in 2018, surely there was a better way than spending seven years of his fleeting life in courtrooms and depositions suing everyone until he finally won one case in a foreign jurisdiction. Materially, all Billy Mitchell got from his Australia win was a piece of paper saying “Congratulations, this guy you hate was wrong about you once.” And that piece of paper cost him a lot of fucking money.

So yeah, no shit he needs you to buy his hot sauce! And those lobster prints. And any other “memorabilia” he can think up. I’d be hard up for money too if I pissed it all away making several personal visits to an Australian casino with a no-payout clause I didn’t bother reading lmaoooooooooo.

Oh, but remember, Billy and Junior certainly wanted you to think they made off with all of Karl’s riches!

Did Billy still think wealth was on its way? Like, it was just taking extra long to cross the wires from Australia? Doesn’t that feel like the oldest line in the book? Or was this more of his usual “Masaya Nakamura personally named me Video Game Emperor of the Galactic Eon” bluster he knows is bogus as he says it? And he just hoped the truth would never come out?

I wish so badly that I could hear Billy’s conversations with his attorneys which led him to all this. There’s simply no way the second firm was dumb enough to take on this borderline case with a serial liar client on contingency. In other words, the lawyers got paid either way. So exactly how up front were they about Billy’s risks versus rewards? Did they even care? Was it “Look Mr. Mitchell, we can proceed as you wish, but just be warned you’re unlikely to recover damages if the money doesn’t exist”? Or did Billy get straight up taken for a ride? I could just imagine, as I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the same sales pitch from hucksters myself. “Oh, don’t worry. Once we’re done, there’ll be plenty of money to go around. We’ll all come out of this rich. All of us.”

The lawyers got paid. Karl lost a lot of money as the involuntary party. Billy’s the one who chose to blow his children’s inheritance on satisfying his own ego. But hey, Billy’s fans on the Internet who surely care about his family’s wellbeing, at least they’re entertained.

DIVORCED FROM REALITY

Karl addresses several more topics in his “Final Lawsuit Update”, including his own mistakes, other Billy lies, and some of the bad faith talking points being spun against him. (Surprise, LUS is a huge liar and a total creepazoid.) I’m not going to waste time rediscussing it all here, especially since I’ve already hit on most of the important stuff either in this series, or in my “Why did Karl Jobst lose” trial retrospective, or as part of coverage of Karl’s new lawsuit.

Karl explained why he chose not to appeal the Barlow ruling, after being rebuked by a “King’s Counsel”. (That’s a Commonwealth thing, don’t ask.) Many people don’t understand that court appeals aren’t a magic do-over. Even if you’re totally innocent, it can still come down to the perspective of the “finder of fact”. It is still possible to roll a terrible judge or jury, and in that case, you have little choice but to eat shit. And of course, Karl acknowledged his mistakes in advertising his Australia lawsuit defense, and in his related GoFundMe, while steadfastly (and correctly) maintaining that he never said anything untrue or misleading, and that he was clear all along he would not discuss the core material of the lawsuit. This is another topic I’ve discussed at length. I’ve done my best to reflect on and identify my own mistakes, so I appreciate Karl’s effort in this same regard. And I love it when someone slices right to the heart of a complicated matter, which I think Karl did here, at about 7:40:

I didn’t want to talk about it because what I said was wrong, and I was afraid to repeat it. However, if I didn’t want to make it clear to everyone exactly what the lawsuit was about, I shouldn’t have turned it into this giant public spectacle.

That’s it, right there. Lesson learned.

With all of that out of the way, I did want to briefly discuss Billy Mitchell’s divorce, now that it’s been publicly acknowledged. Unlike Bonehead Billy, Karl actually did do oppo research on his rival’s finances, including on the background of Billy’s house – or rather, the house Billy lives in. Thus Karl found himself down a rabbit hole trying to pin down why that house was purchased by “Evelyn A. Lugo, a single woman”, during a timeframe when both Billy and Evelyn claim they were “married”. (You can find the relevant documents through public records searches, but I will not upload them here.) What folks researching the matter discovered is that the two were informally partnered but not legally married, with Billy still espoused to another woman named Aleta.

(Please do not bother this Aleta lady. Being married to Billy Mitchell is surely enough trauma for one lifetime.)

It would seem a public appearance by both Billy and Evelyn on MTV in 2003 prompted the wheels to start spinning, with Billy filing for divorce from Aleta on March 21, 2003, and marrying Evelyn basically as soon as that process was finalized. Having researched Billy’s background as I and others have, I couldn’t help but notice that this means Billy and Evelyn had their children out of wedlock. (See “Dot Six” for an example of Billy talking about his “wife” and son in 1999.) All of this would seem to be at odds with their family’s ostensible Catholicism, but hey, it’s not like I give a shit what goes on between you and the Lord – although I guess this does mean I can legally call Billy Junior a fucking bastard.

As an aside, I was made aware of this divorce years ago, but chose not to report it for a few reasons. First, it did feel out of bounds, at least from where I was standing. It didn’t really tie into the video game cheating or the lawsuits I was covering. And believe it or not, there was no personal beef behind my attempts to set the record straight on Billy’s many, many mendacities about basically everything he could possibly lie about. Some people on the Internet respect no boundaries whatsoever, but I feel it’s worth drawing the line somewhere. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally on board with Karl reporting on this when he did the way he did, as it does relate to relevant information about Billy’s financial status (which Billy also lies about), and because Billy’s lawsuits and slander had made their feud personal long ago. I mean, if Billy’s newfound fans are mocking Karl for living in a house owned by his wife, and if Junior is using his dad’s Twitter to emphasize this fact, then surely it’s relevant that their hero has done the same for decades, right? Another reason I was hesitant to highlight this topic was, I know that some people do declare themselves publicly as “married” when they haven’t technically jumped through the legal hoops, and that sort of thing isn’t my business – but again, Karl’s interest was in researching financial obligations, where that very much does matter.

My other reasons were more pragmatic. Even though I’ve endeavored to keep my reporting as factual and non-actionable as possible, I have made mistakes. There was always the chance Mr. Sues Anyone For Criticizing Him would sue me as well, even for making claims that are 100% correct. And so, in addition to the ethical considerations, I strategically kept facts like this in my back pocket. And if Billy ever whined to the court, “Waaaah, Mr. John Doe ‘ersatz_cats’ runs a blog exclusively dedicated to defaming me in any and every way he could,” I could always whip stuff like this out for the court to demonstrate the opposite. “I report on these matters because they’re of public relevance to the gaming community. For example, here is a verifiable fact I discovered years ago, which is unflattering for Billy, but which I chose to withhold because it did not meet my threshold of public relevance.”

You get the idea. But the reason I wanted to delve back into this now is because I found new material!

In my research for this write-up, I reviewed a bunch of response content, including this reaction stream from some guy named Nicholas DeOrio. (Not to be confused with the strictly more famous 1940s soccer player for FC Morgan, Pennsylvania, a town you’ve never heard of because it technically does not exist.) Nick’s interest seems to lie in whoever entertains him best in any given moment. As an example, you saw him a bit earlier, bragging about receiving eleven of those Karl-as-a-lobster prints, although I took so long writing all of this, that reference feels like months ago to me. At about 3:10 in a different stream, Nick confesses to once keeping an ironic shrine to Billy Mitchell, which he declared non-ironic following the Barlow ruling. So yeah, that type of guy. I don’t suppose he now maintains an ironic “Karl Jobst is my hero” display, equally as ready to flip to sincerity mode should Karl humiliate Billy in any new proceedings. Is that how it works?

One “Billy Mitchell” was in Nick’s livestream chat, responding to some of Karl’s video as Nick watched it. But once again, even though Nick interacts with this account as if it’s Mr. Mullet, it’s still clearly just Junior posing as his pops. The giveaway this time is how, during his first stream, “Billy” was offered the opportunity to discuss anything he wanted live, but whoever ran the account chose to keep his remarks text-only. If this happened once, you could say maybe Billy was on a noisy road, or at a busy restaurant or something. But it turns out a lot of people on Billy’s socials are curious why he doesn’t simply appear on all these shows he’s always discussing and interacting with by text:

Anyway, when it came to Karl’s narrative on Billy’s divorce, “Billy Mitchell” had this to say (at about 1:32:10):

I met my wife eight months after separating from my ex-wife in 1996, and it took a long time for us to reach a divorce settlement. It’s just Karl throwing nonsense.

This answer is hilarious, for a few reasons. First, I don’t particularly buy anything coming from either “Billy Mitchell”. Oh, it took you a super-long time to reach a “divorce settlement”, huh? Okay. And this years-long process just happened to finish immediately after Billy Senior appeared with “Billy’s wife” Evelyn on MTV? And that publicity had nothing to do with the timing? Sure sounds to me like you were just fucking around (literally) and then said “Oh shit, this’ll keep being a problem, let’s go ahead and get that taken care of now.” And then suddenly, that supposed “divorce settlement” didn’t take very long after all. That’s what I think.

Can I prove there isn’t some super-secret “divorce settlement” between Billy and Aleta? I guess not. But if it’s a secret to me, it would seem to be a secret to the court as well:

The whole point of a settlement is that it’s enforceable by the court. Thus, parties notify the court when an existing dispute or petition is resolved by agreement, even if the terms remain confidential. When I look up other “Dissolution of Marriage” entries on the Broward county website, I see notes like “Settled or Disposed Before Hearing” or “Settlement Agreement” or “Approving Mediated Settlement Agreement”. Here’s what it said for some other sad sop from Broward who was unlucky enough to share the name William Mitchell:

The conflict has been completely resolved & a signed Mediation Agreement has been obtained & attached

And yet, for William James Mitchell, a.k.a. Mr. Mullet DK cheater guy, there was a summons issued to Aleta? And a “Counter-Petition”? And it came down to a “Non-Jury Trial”?

Hmmmmmmmmm…..

“Hey, what do you care what Billy does or doesn’t say about his divorce?”

I don’t really? But these are lies. And I do care if he’s going to go around accusing an investigative journalist of “throwing nonsense” for making factual statements. Of course I’m going to correct slander. Billy has the option to just say nothing, if he wants. Why not just leave it alone, if all you can do is pile new lies on top of the old ones?

Wait… I feel another new “Law of Billy Mitchell” coming on:

Billy Mitchell will keep adding more and more lies until he finds one you can’t disprove.

So we’re up to seven of those now? Anyway, that’s not what I found truly hilarious about Billy’s stream remark.

If you’d like, go rewatch Karl’s segment on Billy’s divorce, then read what “Billy Mitchell” in chat said again:

I met my wife eight months after separating from my ex-wife in 1996, and it took a long time for us to reach a divorce settlement. It’s just Karl throwing nonsense.

Let’s even assume for the sake of argument that this is the actual, stone-cold, literal truth.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

None of this fucking changes anything!! Okay? The reason it took so long was because of a settlement? Great! Thanks for the added detail. So which part of Karl’s factual and non-contradictory claims was “just Karl throwing nonsense”? Was it the part where Billy filed a petition for dissolution of marriage immediately after the MTV segment aired? That’s no less true than it was before.

I guess that’s the trick, huh? Just add some incidental clarification, and you can gaslight people into thinking you materially addressed anything.

“Here’s a mountain of technical evidence proving beyond any shadow of any doubt that Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong tape, allegedly produced live on Friday at a weekend convention of mortgage brokers, was instead produced using PC software.”

“Nuh-uh, it was on Saturday. You’re just throwing nonsense.”

THE FALLOUT OF THE FALLOUT

Reaction YouTube didn’t handle Karl’s video very well, to put it lightly.

Let’s start with Kino Casino, a former YouTube drama show hosted by two dumbass fucksticks whose names I actively do not want to know. They streamed a reaction to as much of Karl’s video as they could stomach, which used to be located here. Normally, this is where I’d advise you to don your goggles before watching, but it happens that this diarrhetic duo were so dumb, they got their entire channel taken down by a bigger asshole named Jeremy Hambly, a.k.a. “The Quartering”, who I remember for being a douche named “MTG Headquarters” back before I got sucked into this Todd Rogers / Billy Mitchell shit.

Anyway, I had saved this Kino Casino segment locally, as I do. Maybe you can find it somewhere as well. Apparently, what Karl had to say wasn’t going their way, as they both gave up before getting to the part where Billy stands on things. But here are some selected quotes:

He just admitted that he intentionally refused to disclose what the lawsuit was about. So then you scammed every single person that gave you money for it. He just admitted he lied. And he’s just casually glossing over that. You can’t do that. To… factually admit that means he’s just as bad as Completionist, if not worse.

The mental gymnastics here are a sight. Karl always said he would not discuss the core of the lawsuit, and he replayed those segments here to demonstrate. Somehow, not discussing the lawsuit becomes “scammed every single person that gave you money”, which then becomes “He just admitted he lied.” I swear, are these guys just two LUSes wearing masks?

Well yeah, and they are gonna garnish his wages for the next fucking like five years, right? And he’s gotta… has to go bankrupt, he had to sign over all of his properties to his wife, he had to sign over his business to his wife, and so if his wife chooses to leave him, he’ll actually have nothing. He’s gonna go through here how he only has $1,800 left in his checking account. And how, even though he’s lost everything and he’s broke, somehow he won, because Billy can’t extract enough value from him to pay off the legal fees.

“Doesn’t Karl know he’s an idiot because [things I made up]!?”

What happens to money earned by this channel? Well, it will be used to pay Billy, buddy. Like, how else are you gonna pay back your debt, pal? What other source of income do you have?

“But now, you absolute legends, look at how I performed asset fraud in order to save myself.” He’s gonna go through all of the ways that he’s, like tried to screw Billy out of paying him what he owes, which to me it’s a wild thing to detail that, because it’s probably gonna come back up in court.

Bankruptcy doesn’t save you from court collection. It doesn’t. But his plan is to basically own nothing for the rest of his life.

More of those magic ponies. Keep in mind, this was a reaction to Karl’s video, carefully explaining why none of this shit was true. I realize the reaction format lends itself to ignorant impressions of information as it’s being learned in real time. (I didn’t say it was a good thing.) But at least one of the guys demonstrated he had an idea of what the video had to say before reacting to it. And even if they didn’t, the reactions all reek of “You don’t need to tell me, I already know the answer!”

And by the way, no one was like “Oh, Billy’s gonna make a profit off…” No one… It was about who wins what. You know what I mean? And he’s a… he’s a fucking millionaire, bro.

You heard it here, no one bought in to the idea that Billy had made lots of money. No one. Also, Billy is a millionaire, bro! Are you a millionaire with a new mortgage? I didn’t think so!

These two chucklefucks had a lot of fun laughing it up about whatever made-up thing they think Karl was guilty of. But then… they both got vewwwy vewwwy quiet at the point when Karl showed public information on Australian bankruptcy and patiently explained (to paraphrase) “Yes, you get in trouble for improperly moving assets, and yes, the trustee investigated this, and yes, everything that happened was above board, because this is the exact process that’s supposed to happen.” Even without the audio, this gif says so much:

Did you see that? Where the guy on top shook his head a little? Does he disagree? I think he disagrees.

Each time Karl described the proper bankruptcy process he followed, or explained how Australian bankruptcy law works in his favour, these two got awfully silent. But of course, give a little time, and they immediately go right back to “Ohhh, he’s hiding assets with his wife! This can’t be legal! He’s bragging about it, he’s so stoopid, Karl’s gonna get in big trouble again for this!!” (Paraphrasing here, of course.)

This hilariously self-unaware cope session went on for over two hours. These guys were all in on this idea that Billy is wealthy, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that Billy was fine losing literally any amount of money to humiliate Karl. I’ll grant there’s potentially some nuance to this. I think over the years we’ve sufficiently established Billy as a short-sighted malignant narcissist. I could see him, at the start of this journey, telling his lawyers “Yes, I’ll pay you any amount of money to destroy this guy. That’s my only goal.” But that’s far different from Billy standing at the end of that journey, at the moment he believes he’s about to bathe himself in Karl’s wealth, only to realize Karl will not have to pay hardly anything, and his own massive deficits will not be covered. There is no way whatsoever Billy was standing there shrugging “Oh well, at least everyone’s laughing at him, what more can you ask?” The Mitchells’ continued fixation on Karl speaks to their lack of satisfaction.

But I feel like these Kino Casino guys give the game away a bit here. Obviously they want to crap on Karl, and they have the right to do so if they want. It is the Internet. That’s how it works sometimes when you’re a public figure. But this doesn’t require that they invent victories for Billy. They do have the option to say “Well okay, Billy’s a fucking doofus who blew all his cash, sucks to be him, not my problem,” and then go right back to bashing Karl. That is an option. They’re choosing to latch their mockery to a defense of Mr. Lies All The Time. Basically “It is very important to our narrative about Karl Jobst that Billy be successful and immune to failure or mistakes.” I guess this is like those jokers propping up the Completionist, of all people? But of course, if they took that tack, they wouldn’t get their little Kino Casino hot sauce collab with Billy, so you do have to consider the impact of flattery.

The stupid was hardly limited to these two clowns. Somebody named Qwazar77 flipped out when Karl called Billy’s characterization of Karl’s words “hyperbolic”, declaring (at 16:20) “Karl, we watched the video. You blatantly said that Billy is responsible for murder.” (Karl did not. That’s why there was a trial to determine whether an indirect inference was defamatory.) And of course, our pal Nick deOrio (not the soccer player) opened his mouth, and unfortunately words came out. At 17:00 in his first stream, he said to someone in his chat, “If I didn’t know that [the lawsuit] was about Apollo Legend, bro, there’s no way that you did.” (Sure, bud.) In the second stream, Nick seemed to think Karl believed the photoshop of short Billy on the paint can was real. And at 1:25:00, he said – and this is a literal, exact quote, verbatim, word-for-word, expressed with full genuine sincerity – “I feel like you should believe Billy when he’s got a stack of papers.”

Someone named Debergerack chimed in with a relatively short video as well. Here they are at 4:40:

His channel’s fucked, and it’s completely self-inflicted. However, Karl does this weird thing where he tries to frame that as a good thing, because that means Billy’s not going to get any money. And to me, it’s like… You lost! You owe this money to Billy!

Debergerack goes on to explain how Robe guy declares Karl Jobst owes Mullet Man a bazillion squackery-doos is ethically binding, but transparent bankruptcy law means Karl is, quote, “able to weasel his way out of giving Billy anything that he owes him”.

But the reason I bring these up is, there’s a common theme among these kneejerk reactions. See if you notice it with this quote from Qwazar77 (at 1:30):

This whole video can effectively be summarized: Karl forcing himself to say “I lost… but… you know… I actually… not really.”

Or from Nick deOrio (not the soccer player), at the tail end of his first stream:

Two of these sections of the video are just like… attacking Billy’s character and bragging that you don’t owe him any money, and saying that that’s why you’re the real winner.

Or from the Kino Casino boys, three times over:

Apparently this is winning, right? To have a trustee up your ass, and you have to provide them all these fucking documents, and you have to dot your “I”s and cross your “T”s. But that’s winning, right?

But Karl, so… How is this a win for you? That now your company makes half as much money as it ever did before. So now… half as much money as you ever had before, but the money doesn’t go to Billy Mitchell’s pockets except like a quarter-million dollars did. But somehow you’re winning? You’re not winning.

But Karl, didn’t you lose hundreds of thousands of dollars? Like, I just don’t see how Billy also losing money means that you win. Like, it doesn’t make sense.

Geez, Karl is so deluded he thinks he really won! Why won’t he just admit that he lost!?!?

Seriously, how many times does Karl have to publicly and unambiguously acknowledge that he lost? Twenty? Is that the correct number?

The point of Karl’s video was to get factual information out, both about his own bankruptcy, and about Billy’s falsely boasted triumph. Billy tells a bunch of lies. Karl corrects them. The same cycle we’ve been used to for years now.

What’s the deal? Are these people allergic to facts?

I try to avoid psychoanalysis, for obvious reasons. But reckoning with these reactions to Karl’s video has given me new insight into these Self-Proclaimed “Always Winning” types. (“SPAW” types? Oh, forget it.) There’s the expected stuff, such as how Karl’s exceptional transparency about his bankruptcy is treated as foolishness (hence weakness). And obviously, there’s the lack of ethical consideration inherent in nitpicking Jobst for supposedly lying about this or that while cheering Billy Mitchell suing innocent people over his countless provable lies. But watching this stuff, you can just about physically see the gears of their brains grind to a halt when trying to process something that isn’t “Other guys sucks, therefore I win.” And since there seems to only be a single track by which they can process information, they have to invent victories to fill any void, while assuming anyone else must be doing the same. Hey, no wonder these guys latch on to the self-declared “Video Game Player of the Century”.

Of course, this mindset spilled over onto Twitter as well. Sometimes, the jokes write themselves:

“Knowledge inside of the court record thanks to both yourself and LUS” hahahahahaha.

Wait… Is “inside of the court record” referring to when LUS would review my daily reports on the trial? So LUS is the authority, but I’m not? Or is it just the stuff LUS made up out of thin air? Sadly, we don’t get to find out what those supposedly plentiful lies were.

My favorite genre from this era was “People who obviously didn’t bother doing their homework”:

Children and their ponies, I’m tellin’ ya.

Sometimes I think maybe writing is too old-fashioned, that if I want to get my perspective out there, I need to take up video production, which I’m observably bad at. (I will attempt it again some day, and I do have a couple ideas to that end.) But even when the information is out there, easily digestible, people choose to ignore it. Some of these idiots would probably struggle to absorb the news if you put it in a tiny spoon for them and made little plane noises as you waved it through the air. I can’t make them read. Also, while I am anti-ignorance, it is objectively funnier when suckers like these proudly announce themselves as clueless idiots.

Meanwhile, Junior piloting his dad’s Twitter responded exactly as you’d expect…

… by stomping his feet and declaring that this time, he’ll be really mad:

lolololololololol “VERY SOON” “VERY SOON”!!! That was a year ago now. I hope Junior’s not holding his breath, too. I’m certainly not.

Oh, and remember when Billy – as in, actual on-camera Mullet Man – said he had no intention of responding to whatever else Karl might have to say? This brings us to my personal favorite:

Geez, again with the fawning. “Okay, okay, your majesty. I’m sorry to have upset you, your highness.” The lack of self-respect some people have. Apparently all they need is a handshake and an assurance that this time it’ll really happen.

I’ve mostly focused on Billy’s idiot followers because… Well, they’re funnier to look at. Roundtables of intelligent, informed people just don’t get the ratings or the lulz! But I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking the entire Internet is nothing but idiocy, or that Billy’s new fan club necessarily represents the majority response. If you want to see reactions to “Final Lawsuit Update” favoring Karl, you need look no further than the direct replies:

The people Billy doesn’t have perma-blocked also joined in the heckling:

Nothing close to a ratio, but remember, half of Twitter doesn’t even see Billy’s tweets unless they specifically bring them up like I had to do. And the Billy-supportive replies are going at a similar rate.

Other folks got in on the fun, too. There was this funny “Between two ferns” skit by Retro Adam, featuring one of the most accurate depictions of Billy Mitchell you’ll ever see.

Things turned around on Reddit as well. Even on the very subreddit where all the bankruptcy misinformation was first planted, Karl’s video garnered mostly positive reviews:

lol I wasn’t expecting that last part to be quite so true. A now-deleted account then tried to raise a stink about how Karl overlaid the original hanging image on top of the screenshot of Billy’s tweet. Recall that Karl’s video showed both the infamous hanging tweet as posted (which included Karl’s actual face in the corner) and this overlay, so people could see the source image underneath. The user tried to frame this as intentional deception on Karl’s part, but this time nobody took the bait. Most replies agreed, if anything, that Billy’s “uncensored” version was worse for including a real photo of Karl along with the hanging depiction.

A lot of people still support Karl. Or at minimum, they support him over Billy. They were just quiet because… well, it seemed Karl had gotten kicked in the teeth. And he did lose the lawsuit. But this crowd was reinvigorated hearing the truth behind Billy Mitchell’s lies of unqualified victory and lavish splendor. Maybe in the end all you need is a lying grifter who everyone – at least everyone with self-respect – can agree is a massive douche.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

That all should be plenty of fun for one day. However, for bookkeeping purposes, and to keep anyone from accusing me of avoiding anything, I suppose I should throw in a section detailing what else the two parties have been up to since the Australia lawsuit.

Ah, right. Another lawsuit. But again, that’s a whole ‘nother story, and we’re setting that aside today. There are a few loose ends from the “We’re finally done with Billy Mitchell lawsuits, and no, we don’t know about the new future lawsuit yet” window of history.

There’s not much to say for Karl’s course of action. What else could he do? His choices were to go back to working some shitty nine-to-five, or get back off the mat and keep making videos. He chose the latter. And I’m glad he did. The specter of “You misled us” (unfair as it may be) will haunt his work for some time. That’s how it goes when you make very public mistakes. But eventually, people forgive, and people forget. If this saga has taught me anything – watching this very open and public spat over Karl’s statements about the Billy-Apollo settlement become “I thought Karl was getting sued for saying Billy cheated” – it’s that the Internet’s functional memory isn’t as robust as we had been led to believe.

As has already been referenced in this series, both Jirard the Completionist and some windbag named “Accounting and YouTube” tried to capitalize on Karl’s vulnerability with hit pieces of their own. And this did not end well for them lmao. I would say more, but… Do I really need to?

Karl also faced controversy for his coverage of cheating allegations against RileyCS, a transgender Counter-Strike player. This brouhaha dovetailed with the transphobia I documented in “part 2” of this series. While you could say in a sense that Karl was “defending” RileyCS, the intentional-misunderstanders of the world framed it as though Karl was affirmatively arguing that she did not cheat. In reality, Karl was pointing out how the evidence people were relying on was inconclusive, and that higher standards of proof should be sought. (Let’s not miss the irony that this same crowd would happily excoriate Karl for jumping to conclusions too early.) But don’t think that Karl has gone soft, and is now afraid to call out cheaters when he sees them. In 2021, Karl covered the original cheating claims against Minecraft speedrunner Dream, concluding that Dream’s faulty run was likely the result of mistakes rather than malice. However, in March of this year, Karl discussed new cheating allegations, which prompted him to change his opinion and conclude that Dream’s “mistakes” constituted intentional cheating. So it goes.

On the other side of this equation, Billy obviously continued his wanton spree of mocking Karl in each and every way he possibly could, legal considerations be damned. If I have not already made this clear elsewhere, I wish to do so now: I do not begrudge Billy gloating about his big court win, illegitimate as it was. (I can definitely say it was illegitimate, given that the awarded damages were based on provable lies accepted as truth.) I don’t like Billy Mitchell, or his bastard son, and I think many of the particular jokes they make are amateurish and unfunny, but they’re under no obligation to meet my standards, or to consider my entertainment needs. Billy won. Karl lost. You won’t hear me say the Mitchells need to go easy on poor Karl, except in the context of whether their efforts might be self-defeating for publicity purposes, or the fact that Billy has now gotten his ass sued for failing to understand basic restraint, lol.

(Someone may make the comparison to Billy falsely boasting about being “champion” of Donkey Kong all those years, which was also based on straight up lies. Billy bragging in that context was totally unacceptable. I understand the comparison, but I do think this situation involves different nuance. That conversation is too long to delve into here.)

I do want to elaborate on this subject for a moment, though. As we all recall, Karl preemptively gloated about making “a hundred vids rubbing it in afterwards”, declaring “I’m not gonna be a good winner.” And this has been cited by others in Billy’s Twitter replies to say that there is no ethical boundary to Billy’s boasting. Again, fair play. Maybe Karl should not have said those things, lol. But the reason I bring this up is… I don’t think Karl would actually have followed through with “a hundred vids rubbing it in”. Even though he said specifically that he would have. As always, I don’t speak for Karl. This is my own perspective. Certainly he would’ve done a few, covering the events of the trial, and highlighting Billy’s bogus testimony, which he did in our reality. But I believe Karl would have swiftly gotten sick of the whole thing. He had already once publicly expressed an interest in being done talking about this douchebag. But because Billy followed through with one of his lawsuit threats, Karl went on to make (by my count) twenty more videos referencing Billy Mitchell prior to their trial. Karl has spoken about the fact he kept covering Billy on his channel because he was putting so much time and energy into his case research that he effectively had to double up that work as video research. I can also speak from a position of some authority on this. I’ve surprised myself with my own voluntary dedication to covering the never-ending Billy Mitchell saga, but I will confess, there have been moments where I too have asked myself, “Will I ever be done writing about this fucking guy?” Even if Karl had won, no matter the magnitude of the victory, I think he would have been eager to move the fuck on.

I guess you could say, the notion that Karl would not have made those hundred gloating vids is another reason he should have simply kept his mouth shut on that one. Why say the thing that gets you in trouble if it’s not even true? You won’t catch me confessing to stealing precious jewels from the Louvre, and certainly not more than the one time you know about.

Anyway, after Karl’s bombshell follow-up video, Billy (actual Billy) finally resumed arcade streaming in late August, this time on YouTube instead of Twitch. Even before the new lawsuit, I had decided this “fallout roundup” series couldn’t cover all the dumb things said by Billy and his chatters on these streams. Shit like people asking Billy if he’s played Donkey Kong Bananza yet, like they have literally no idea who this guy is. They may as well be asking Alan Alda whether he’s improved his PB on Super Metroid. Collecting all this would be an installment of its own. Some day I do want to do a “Stupid shit from Billy Mitchell streams” write-up, going through all my archives back to 2018… but no promises lmao.

However, there is one moment I’d like to highlight here. That first August stream consisted of, like two minutes of Ms. Pac-Man play followed by four hours of Billy interacting with chatters while the game ran in attract mode. At about 3:07:50, a chatter asks Billy if he would ever set up a GoFundMe to cover his own legal expenses. Billy of course is too proud to admit he needs the money, choosing instead to recoup losses by selling overpriced merchandise as we’ve already discussed. But Billy does give an interesting response:

No, I haven’t considered that. I’ll tell you what I’ve actually considered, and I don’t know how to go about it, so… Guess I’m not going to. I actually considered setting up a fund that… if you can… First of all, you have to prove, here, I gave a hundred dollars to… I gave ten dollars, I gave twenty dollars, I gave it to… So you have to prove that you did it, you know, by… you know, a bank record or whatever. And you prove that you paid into Karl’s… GoFundMe, you were lied to, you were deceived, okay, and that you would get your money back. Because you were a victim, too. I mean, you were. I can call you stupid, I could say you weren’t listening, I could say you weren’t paying attention, and maybe you weren’t, okay. But you were a victim, too. I mean, you were.

Ah yes, no doubt Billy Mitchell strongly considered this wholly impractical free money giveaway to strangers on the Internet. During the earlier “loud people are angry at Karl” phase of the fallout, there was this shitshow about whether Karl could or would refund GoFundMe donors who retroactively felt they were deceived about the nature of the fundraiser or lawsuit. (Even though everything about Karl’s personal GoFundMe was above board.) First of all, it just doesn’t work. Refunds through GoFundMe are impossible years later, and after the money has been withdrawn. Second, without the platform’s involvement, verification isn’t possible. What are you gonna do, ask people “What name did you use and how much did you donate?” And then check the publicly available donor list? “Wow, there it is! A thousand-dollar donation from a Mr. Netherworld Arcade! Well, Mr. Arcade, send me your bank info and I’ll get your thousand dollars to you right away!”

Lastly… Do people not understand how bankruptcy works? Okay, I’m no expert, but from what I understand, the trustee comes in, they check all your assets and bank accounts, your money gets assessed, some property may get liquidated, and then the results are sliced up among your creditors. When it comes to the paying-people-back part, the trustee makes those decisions, not the bankrupt individual. The individual’s job is to keep their fucking nose clean for three years, or however long. Heck if you were paying attention to Karl’s video, you would have noticed his legal debt to his own lawyers – the ones administering his bankruptcy – was also held up in the bankruptcy process. And the trustee also scours through your recent financial history to make sure you haven’t done any shenanigans. So guess what? Whether you want to call GoFundMe refunds “debt” or not, you can’t give out a bunch of your money to your friends on the Internet while declaring bankruptcy. Are you fucking high!?!? These mfers will accuse Karl of bankruptcy fraud over a benign and completely misunderstood Discord message, and then turn around and demand Karl commit bankruptcy fraud.

I swear!

Okay, so obviously Billy understands the impracticality of this, especially as a third party. And he does make clear that this ain’t gonna happen. But he enjoys floating the idea that this is a thing he seriously considered, strictly as a way of dunking on his arch-nemesis. I mean, it costs Billy nothing whatsoever to say he almost could-have-would-have refunded Karl’s donors, if only he had been allowed to. After all, someone out there might actually take Mr. Lies-All-the-Time-About-Anything-and-Everything’s mere word for it. And judging by his chat, that’s exactly what happened:

The fact that you considered refunding those who donated to Karl, despite their opposition to you at the time, truly reflects your character. Keep being a legend, Billy.

I dunno, man. Some people are easily impressed.

Moving on, next up on our list is… whatever the fuck this was:

Wuuuut du fuuuuq?

AAAAARGH!!! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!!

I saw a few initial reactions thinking these had to be photoshop or AI, but no, this cursed shit was real. Some outfit named Martine Rose, named after a clothing designer I’d never heard of, did an advertising collaboration with a few competitive gamers, like SonicFox and Scarlett. You know, stars of popular competitive games such as Valorant and Counter-Strike. But apparently they also wanted to throw something toward classic gaming, and as usual, normies never know the name of any old school gamer except the aggressively lying and cheating con-artist whose friend and business partner always proudly declares him to be the single greatest gamer in all of history.

The reason Billy’s appearance was so unsettling – other than that horrifying shaved cat thing he’s wielding – is he looks so out of character. And I do mean character. I’ve spoken to people who have known Billy in real life, and what they’ve described is that he’s a totally different person in front of the cameras. And his costume, always wearing that suit and tie – which you may have noticed developed over the years – is a part of that character. My amateurish understanding is costumes like that are part of the whole narcissism thing, but again, I’m not an expert. Anyway, obviously a clothing designer is going to want to show off their clothing, so he’s wearing something totally different. So I guess that checks out.

Ultimately, nothing has to be read into this. Everything but the demon cat is totally explainable. But still… There’s a part of me that can’t help thinking either they paid Billy an exceptionally handsome sum to do publicity in such stark contrast to his consistent decades-long persona… or they offered the standard amount and he really needed that cash.

Billy’s appearance went over with real gamers about as well as you’d expect. On the other end, there was a little chatter from a few idiots about how Billy had been “sponsored by Nike” or whatever, including in the replies on this very site:

But other folks caught on quick that this seemed more to be a Martine Rose initiative, and that she’s the one with the Nike deal. Something, something, Masaya Nakamura, right?

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. Something buried in all this made me cackle out loud. Included with the announcement was a brief biography, including the misrepresentation that Billy had “won legal battles restoring his historical records”. Standard stuff you hear from people who don’t really have any idea what happened and don’t care to read more than Billy’s own summary. However, that same biography carried this little note:

Billy claims to be the first person to achieve a perfect Pac-Man, though this is disputed.

LMAOOOOOOOO Oh, “disputed” you say? Why is that word there? I’m guessing Billy didn’t negotiate the extra “I sign off on all associated commentary” clause.

Speaking of Billy needing money, there’s something… missing… from his big post-lawsuit redemption tour…

Something Billy loves to do…

Something he’s known for…

Something he revels in…

Something he claims to have been doing several times a year prior to Jobst’s video…

Right!! Convention appearances!

Ummmm……

Well, more recently, Billy did his usual appearance at Southern-Fried Gaming Expo, organized by some of his personal friends. No idea if they paid him a fee from their event budget, or just gave him a free booth. But for now, we’re talking about the approximately one-year window between lawsuits. And correct me if I’m wrong… but I count one such appearance.

In December, an anime cosplay convention named Holiday Matsuri, or “HolMat” to its friends, invited Billy Mitchell to host screenings of “King of Kong” and that new shitty Walter Day movie. This convention had so little to do with arcade gaming, I’m surprised Billy didn’t walk away with a new Donkey Kong world record on VHS.

It’s easy to get lost perusing Billy’s insane Twitter followers and pondering what sort of brain dysfunction they’ve been cursed with. But you start to get a better idea of Billy’s actual post-lawsuit “popularity” (or lack thereof) when he steps outside his comfort bubble:

I legit struggled to find any – and I mean any – photos of Billy at the event, even though he had a booth and did a speaking bit. And the two photos I did find were like “This is weird” and “Who invited this guy?”

We got our best look at Billy’s HolMat appearance courtesy of cosplay YouTuber Sarah Spaceman, who wasn’t any more thrilled about Billy’s presence than you or I.

First of all, I’m not a cosplay guy, so it’s kind of a foreign world to me. I’m always amazed at what creative people can do, but I personally would struggle to cosplay anything more elaborate than a Seahawks jersey or like a Starfleet shirt. But I did watch the whole video, and it’s great stuff. Sarah highlighted the absolutely sickest Kefka cosplay you will ever see, by someone named peach.y.cos. (FF6 for life!!) I refuse to timestamp it for you; you will have to give Sarah’s video a watch to find it, and I encourage you to do so.

Anyway, the Billy-related segment runs from about 5:45 to about 7:10. Billy is introduced to the… uh, “crowd”, by the emcee, who happens to be one of those two photo participants I found. Does that mean literally half of the “fans” posting a photo with Billy were paid to do so lmao? We can also see Billy playing MAME Donkey Kong against strangers, using some yellow-and-blue PC arcade stick. He’s nearly finished out the rainbow. But the best part was, we got this amazing reaction shot from Sarah, who was as puzzled as anyone why Billy Mitchell was making wife-deprecating jokes to a near-empty audience at a cosplay convention.

This is what happens when your big “victory lap” doesn’t translate beyond Internet chuds. Basically the entire comment section is bagging on Billy, his inexplicable invitation to HolMat, and the fact he thought his jokes about women would land there.

But one thread in particular jumped out at me:

Now, here’s what’s funny about this to me. You would be right to argue “Well, there’s no way of knowing that that’s really Billy Mitchell, or his son. It’s just an account named ‘Billy Mitchell 7403’ with no videos. Could be anyone!”

However… This account, with the magenta and capital “B” icon… This account is not unknown to me.

When I checked the URL for this “Billy Mitchell 7403”, it matched up to an account page I had screenshot back in 2022. Here was the exact URL I saved from that time. And the reason I’d taken that screenshot is because this person was in a bunch of YouTube replies, arguing with David Race and Carlos Pineiro and whoever else, always in fervent defense of Mr. Mullet. I did not save a full compendium of these interactions, but looking now, I did find one comment in my bulk of screenshots from that era. This was deep in the replies to an upload of the film “Chasing Ghosts”, which has since been taken down:

LMAO I swear I didn’t cherry-pick that.

Again, the “3 months ago” is relative to when I took the screenshot, which was September 2022. So this magenta “Billy Mitchell” has been at this for a while. And most everything he says is a lie. But that still doesn’t prove it’s Junior. It’s just an account, and anyone could be behind that keyboard.

However… There is one other clue. Unfortunately, you would have to take my word for this. I don’t think I ever mentioned it in my Brisbane trial coverage, as I was crunched getting all my notes in, and it would’ve been a lengthy aside with not much point at that time. But Billy’s barrister used various computer screenshots as evidence, including captures of YouTube comments and such. I never had the exact images used in Brisbane court – you may recall I had to substitute some screenshots of my own. So I can’t show what I don’t have possession of. But sitting in that courtroom, when they showed these exhibits on the side screen, I noticed the user icon of whoever did those YouTube screenshots was visible in many of them. And it was that damn same magenta-“B” that was arguing with Carlos and David back in 2022 lololololol!

So yeah. It’s basically certain that Magenta-“B” is Junior, actively searching out references to his father, desperately trying to defend his family’s fraudulent legacy. Which makes his comments especially hilarious!

you’re very correct except about a dozen defamation cases. There was one, knucklehead

Let’s see, there was a defamation lawsuit against Karl. (That’s setting aside the three lawsuit threats, which were also over “defamation”.) There was one against Apollo Legend. There was one against Donkey Kong Forum along with Jeremy Young and the late Jeff Harrist. And there was the one against Twin Galaxies in Florida, as well as the separate lawsuit against TG in California, which I would remind you, Junior must know about because he was an active paralegal.

Like, why even open your mouth if you’re going to lie this poorly?

“Nuh-uh, yur an idiot, cuz Billy only sued one person for defamation, dummy.”

I swear, that whole family is a garden shed full of tools.

Anyway, we have one last stop on Billy’s big social media victory tour. Billy did a couple videos reading old hate mails he and his lawyers have received over the years. And of course, he’s still hocking those lobster prints. As with all things from Team Billy, you can’t immediately accept these messages at face value, but I do believe they’re genuine, as the Internet is a stupid place, and I don’t think anyone in that camp is clever enough to conjure these.

The first three emails that Billy reads are addressed to his lawyers, although Billy did not specify which firm. For the especially curious, I think all three were sent to the since-vaporized Miller Bou-Samra in Australia. The first refers to a “Subject line”, which MBS did use on a contact form, but which does not appear on similar forms used by Billy’s other various attorneys. The second message was sent to an “Info” email, which matches MBS’ alternative contact option. And a third email read by Billy directly quotes a bio from the old MBS website. I have no doubt Manning & Kass received similar nonsense, but who knows, maybe Tony and Kristina weren’t keen on passing those fun missives along to their albatross client.

But here’s what I find funny. Every other message Billy reads, from this video and a second one, are super-old. The ones with identified dates all range from 2009-2012. There are people driving cars who aren’t even as old as some of these emails. And the only real world events and circumstances referenced are those seen in “King of Kong” (released in 2007). One message, which Billy says is from “one of the original crybabies”, is clearly authored by Dwayne Richard, who had a falling out with Billy around that same timeframe. Dwayne’s message declares, among other things, that “the demonic has no jurisdiction so you better prepare to meet the LORD JESUS CHRIST”, adding that Billy’s “Pagan” behavior will get him in spiritual trouble. Another message from someone else does say, quote, “you cheated by glitching to get over 1-million on Donkey Kong”, but again, that draws from the movie, where people called the VHS distortion at the million-point rollover a “glitch” or whatever. The point is, setting aside those three missives to his lawyers, Billy doesn’t read anything referring to the MAME evidence published in 2018, or his more recent lawsuits. I don’t wish to encourage or glorify harassment, but surely this man has received more recent hate mail than this! I guess it must take him a long time to get over how much rude criticism stings, lmao. Yeah, sure, I too could have a good laugh reading nasty things said about me a gazillion years ago. That’s easy mode.

I won’t lie to you, though. And I mean what I’m about to write with full sincerity. If you take these two “Hate Mail” videos in isolation, they are entertaining to watch. This is who I wish Billy Mitchell actually was. Remember, I used to be a fan of Billy’s, before I found out that he was a massive fraud and that basically everything that comes out of his mouth is a self-serving lie. But he does put on a good act. I know I’m not the only one who fell for it. The accusation against Billy was never that he lacked charisma, or was not an interesting character, or even that he was actively bad at Donkey Kong. Cheating in official competition obviously crossed the line, as doing so pisses all over the hard work of people who earned the right to call themselves “Champion” and “World Record Holder”, while cheapening the glue of the community he pretends to be an ambassador for. But at this point, Billy’s real crimes are all the awful things he’s done to so many innocent people just to evade having to own up to the proven fact he lied to everyone about high scores on video games. He had the option to admit it and laugh it off a decade ago, and instead we got all this.

The version of Billy Mitchell where he’s just a fun guy, self-aware, full of himself but with a dash of self-deprecation for seasoning, movie villain but not really-for-real villain – that version of Billy Mitchell does not exist, no matter how much he wants to pretend otherwise. If it was a gag, he wouldn’t have wasted nearly a decade of his own life in courtrooms mired in lawsuits, lying through his teeth in sworn testimony. Billy’s a practiced manipulator and con-artist, which honestly could serve him well in certain fields, but these talents don’t explain his demonstrated priorities. I know, I know, psychoanalysis. I did say I try to avoid it. But I’ve watched enough Billy Mitchell streams and presentations and interviews these past nine years to confidently say that the reason he cheats at things is because he’s horrifically insecure. And he keeps lying about it, insisting all his super-real high scores were legit, not because they don’t matter, but because to him they do. Years after the cheating scandal has left the news cycle, he keeps bringing it up himself, because he needs you to believe it all. That’s not an act. He tells you so, not through his words, but through his actions. It’s who he has always been. Him winning a lawsuit and gaining a newfound niche following of fresh suckers has done nothing to change him. And if you come away from watching his videos thinking otherwise, I’m afraid it is because he has conned you, too.

RELITIGATION

Okay, we’re almost done for today, but for reals this time. You might have noticed though, I skipped one rather important admission from Karl’s “Final Lawsuit Update”. Here’s the man in his own words, starting at about 4:00:

Now that the lawsuit has been over for a couple of months, and I no longer have a vested interest in being correct, it has allowed me to finally accept that in this instance, Billy wasn’t lying, and his lawsuit against me was not unjustified. I defamed Billy. My actions were unacceptable. And that’s why he won.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that Billy didn’t also lie a lot, even in court. And it doesn’t mean I actually caused him hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, like the judge asserted. And it doesn’t mean I didn’t also have a valid defense that I could have possibly won on. But just in principle, I was at fault. My actions were wrong, and to be quite honest after the dust has settled, I now personally believe I should have lost the lawsuit. However, I still think the damages awarded were far, far too high.

“Well, there you have it, ersatz. Even Karl himself has finally acknowledged that he did defame Billy after all. There’s no need to keep defending what he said. There’s nothing on the line anymore. The charade is over. You can stop kidding yourself. You can just accept you were wrong. Just admit it. Embrace it. Let it go. Are we really going to do this? Are you truly going to stand here, and look me in the eye, and tell me you still think Karl Jobst didn’t defame Billy Mitchell? When even the man himself admits he did do it? Are you really willing to be the only person left on this green Earth, the last known human in the universe, the final remaining entity on this entire plane of existence, who thinks Karl deserved to win his lawsuit defense?”

Ohohohohohohohohoho, you have no idea how badly I would love to relitigate this entire case, at any moment. There’s just not time today. And I’m certainly going to do a retrospective at some future point, so I’ll save my full thoughts for that.

For now, some quick notes. I have spoken to people I respect who previously believed Karl should have won, who have since come around, and I respect their position. (Though even they agree the awarded damages were way too high.) But I do indeed still believe Karl did not meaningfully defame Billy Mitchell, and I have also spoken to others who feel the same. I have to say “meaningfully”, because “defame” can have such a broad meaning, up to and including merely “You reported facts that make me look bad.” And of course, there are different legal protections where I live in the United States than there are in Australia. So to be clear, I still believe that Karl did not defame Billy in a legally actionable sense (though some of Karl’s actions and inactions obviously put him in legal jeopardy as a pragmatic matter).

I followed the facts all along. And that includes material that never made it into the trial. I never based my assessment strictly on Karl’s opinion or his confidence, so his change of mind does not necessitate that I change mine. Granted, Karl has had access to resources I have not, including his ineffectual lawyers, and an apparent post-trial tongue-lashing from a “King’s Counsel”. However, while I don’t wish to impugn Karl’s sincerity, one can’t deny that it’s healthier for him – both professionally and personally – to simply accept the outcome and move on. While I have been wrong about things in my coverage of the Billy saga, and have issued corrections when called for, I need a better reason to do so in this case. The damages were objectively inflated based on provable lies, making it that much harder for me to blindly accept the court’s opinion. Again, I have a better perspective on why Karl lost, as a practical matter, but that’s a different question than “Did Karl defame Billy?”

I assure you, this is the short version lol. I could say so much more, but here’s the point I really wanted to get at today: Judge Ken Barlow could have convinced me otherwise. You can’t say I didn’t give him a shot. I’m accustomed to legal opinions that justify themselves. I would’ve liked comparative rulings from similar cases (if there are any). Or like, a three-prong analysis. The way great legal minds usually break down complicated matters into constituent elements, and identify the crux on which the question hinges. And if Barlow wanted to put Karl and others on notice for reckless reporting, he certainly had space to say “Mr Jobst pushed his statements too far, I’m not impressed with him for these reasons, but he can count his lucky stars that plaintiff’s own contumelious conduct and unreliable testimony nullify more serious damages.” Or some other “Both of you suck” thing like that. Instead we got “Hurr durr, Billy Mitchell seems like an honest guy to me. All of his bullshit might be wrong, but that doesn’t mean anything, he was probably just confused or something. Every time someone said ‘RIP Apollo’ or whatever, all of that is more proof Karl is guilty. Here’s a bunch of other shit I know nothing about, and I clearly have no idea what’s going on right in front of me, but that doesn’t matter either. I can’t be expected to pay attention. Why can’t Karl admit all his other videos on Billy I’ve never watched are probably wrong and pointless? Why won’t he leave this poor innocent man alone? Oh shit, this Watkins guy correctly said everyone was offended by Billy’s texts about Apollo, I’d better tell everyone Watkins was nonsensical and pretend that never happened. Oh cool, here’s my chance to talk about knights and dragons and to put this young punk in his stupid place.”

To be clear, Barlow may not give a shit. This isn’t the movies. Sometimes, there’s no justice in this world. Sometimes people just suck. But there is a part of me that would like to imagine that Ken has seen a glimpse or two of the aftermath of his involvement. That he’s seen how the Mitchells have conducted themselves in the fallout of their conferred victory, how they’ve crossed the bounds of expected gloating into blatant serial defamation, not to mention the hanging tweet which dispels any veneer of “rEgReT” for any prior “dArK hUmOr”. Anyone who knows who Billy Mitchell is could have anticipated this, but sometimes judges are the last ones to see it. Given how my “Day 2” bit about Billy texting Junior in court was brought to Barlow’s attention before the next morning’s session had convened, I don’t doubt that some portion of this has graced Barlow’s inbox, at least by way of my unrepentant excoriation of him and his horseshit opinion. I would want to believe Mr. Barlow now has some idea now of how badly he fucked everything up. And even if he has, there’s literally nothing he can do to correct it now. But again, I’m probably hoping for too much. He’s probably just another asshole.

Thank you all for reading, as always! I suppose this series may get renewed for a “part four” after the new lawsuit dust settles, which may be years from now. But much sooner than that, we’ll reconvene here again, to discuss the new rulings we currently await. Here’s hoping for better jurisprudence this time around.