The Daily Beast has published an article about RFK Jr.s case against me and reported the filing:
The draft complaint indicated Kennedy intended to file in New York federal court, though he subsequently requested a jury trial against [blogger] in Rockingham, New Hampshire on Aug. 29, though neither he nor [the blogger] resides there.
The filing date is significant, as I’ll explain later. RFK Jr.’s attorney — Robert Barnes — is apparently the go-to lawyer for MAGA celebrities. As the Daily Beast points out, Barnes also represents Kyle Rittenhouse. But there’s more. Barnes also represented Alex Jones in the lawsuit filled by the parents of the 2021 Sandy Hook school mass shooting.
Actually, there is an awful symmetry in Barne’s clients: each of them has grifted $millions after destroying lives. Rittenhouse killed 2 unarmed BLM protestors with an assault rifle — much to the delight of Tucker Carlson and other right-wing pundits. Alex Jones tortured the Sandy Hook parents, already suffering devastating grief over their dead children, by claiming the massacre was a staged hoax. But RFK Jr. has been the by far the biggest threat to public safety with his dangerous anti-vaxx falsehoods. According to Center for Countering Digital Hate, Kennedy has earned $millions through his Orwellian-named ‘Children’s Health Defense’, with revenue spiking during the height of the COVID pandemic. The independent health research group KFF put out an estimate of the number of Americans whose COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented through vaccination:
This updated analysis estimates that nationally at least 234,000 deaths from COVID-19 between June 2021 and March 2022 could have been prevented with a primary series of vaccinations. These vaccine-preventable deaths represent 60% of all adult COVID-19 deaths since June 2021, when vaccines first became widely available to adults across the country, and a quarter (24%) of the nearly 1 million COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began.
So what’s the significance of August 29? And why New Hampshire? Neither Kennedy nor I resides in the Granite State. Barnes surveyed the statutes of limitation for defamation suits around the US. In nearly every state the statute is one year. New Hampshire is one of only three states where the statute is three years. August 29, 2023 is three years to the date of Kennedy’s Querdenken speech in Berlin and my Daily Kos post. Three years. That’s how long RFK Jr. has been going after me and Daily Kos for a five-sentence recap of a German newspaper article.
