In an appearance with Seth Myers after former (and late) Fox News chief Roger Ailes was sued for sexual harassment, O’Reilly said, “You’re a target, I’m a target. Any time, somebody could come out and sue us, attack us, go to the press or anything like that. And that’s a deplorable situation.”

Now O’Reilly is turning the tables. On Friday, his lawyers filed something known as a “summon and notice” in a Nassau County, N.Y., court outlining a beef with one Michael Panter, an attorney and a former member of the New Jersey State Assembly. He’s also the author of an extensive Facebook post alleging vindictive behavior by O’Reilly as sexual harassment allegations began snuffing out his career prospects. The post concerns an ex-girlfriend of Panter’s and O’Reilly’s behavior toward her. Asked about the post by Mediaite, Panter said that the post wasn’t intended for a broad audience, but it reached one after some social-media promotion by Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman.

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The action isn’t a full-fledged lawsuit, yet. It’s merely the first notice to a defendant that a suit is afoot.

View it as a warm-up for a complaint, complete with this language: “This action seeks redress for Defendant Panter’s intentional, malicious, and bad faith actions in making defamatory and false statements in a publicly-available social media post,” reads the summons. “Plaintiff seeks damages for the public hatred, ridicule, disgrace, and permanent harm to his professional and personal reputations as a result of Defendant Panter’s publication of knowingly false defamatory statements about Plaintiff, which were made with actual malice, as well as Defendant Panter’s intentional infliction of emotional distress upon Plaintiff.” As a public figure, of course, O’Reilly must prove actual malice, a legal threshold requiring proof that the defendant knowingly published falsehoods or did so with reckless disregard of the truth. O’Reilly is seeking “not less than $5 million” in damages, fees, etc.

Whatever the legal standard, the summon claims a whopping impact from a Facebook post, especially considering that O’Reilly has watched in anger as the New York Times has published carefully reported allegations from his accusers/former colleagues at Fox News. Former legal analyst Lis Wiehl, for example, reached a $32 million settlement with the fallen King of Cable News over allegations of “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her,” according to the New York Times. “This is crap, and you know it,” O’Reilly told the newspaper. Wiehl in January signed an affidavit asserting “no claims against Bill O’Reilly concerning any of those emails or any of the allegations in the draft complaint.”

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When pressed on such allegations, O’Reilly repeatedly argues that none of his colleagues over a 20-year-plus career at Fox News filed an HR complaint against him.

Surveying the reportage of O’Reilly’s alleged misdeeds yields this paragraph from the New York Times’s April story, which triggered the events leading to his dismissal from Fox News:

The women who made allegations against Mr. O’Reilly either worked for him or appeared on his show. They have complained about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating, according to documents and interviews.