Malibu Media v. Tashiro (INSD 13-cv-00205 ) is an eventful case (228 documents so far), one of the few “ cases to watch ” — mostly copyright shakedown lawsuits in which defendants didn’t succumb to extortionists’ threats and decided to hire competent attorneys to fight back. Some of these cases (and this case in particular) have all the prospects to end up in front of a jury in the first trial of this kind ¹

I wrote about this case in the past: a sad story in which morally dead attorneys “on behalf” of jaded pornographers tried to extort money from an Indiana resident by threatening to destroy her life. Ironically, the defendant Kelly Tashiro is a nurse — a profession dedicated to saving lives.

Tashiro retained Jonathan Phillips and always maintained her innocence.

After the trolls realized that their case against Kelley is weak, they pointed their finger at her husband Charles, adding him as a defendant on 5/15/2014. Phillips began representing Charles too, and the newly added defendant also maintained his innocence since then. No evidence of XArt’s smut was ever found on the household hard drives by the Malibu’s expert.

As in virtually every case, when it turned out that the trolls had neither facts nor law to pound, they universally played the spoliation/perjury card, dangerously moving into the criminal law domain. Apparently, alleging criminal actions has more leverage in wrestling defendants into submission than does weaponizing the stigma attached to “barely legal” hardcore pornography.



On 1/29/2015 a big milestone — an evidence hearing — was set to happen. Not trusting his stooge Paul Nicoletti to handle the matters, Keith Lipscomb himself (with an associate) flew to Indianapolis.

On the eve of this hearing, seemingly sensing the gravity of the accusations of potentially criminal conduct, Charles Tashiro rather unexpectedly invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying about certain matters. As a result, the hearing was essentially cancelled.

The trolls went postal. A motion to sanction both Charles Tashiro and Jonathan Phillips was filed shortly thereafter. Lipscomb and Co accused Phillips of orchestrating the “sabotage” of the hearing and wanted more than $15,000 from the defendant and his former counsel.

After the botched hearing, citing the conflict of interest, Phillips withdrew as Charles Tashiro’s attorney. Erin Russell appeared on behalf of Charles shortly after.

On 3/16/2015 Phillips responded, calmly explaining the rationale behind the events that pissed off the trolls so much.

On 4/1/2015 Erin Russell also filed a short and stern response complementing Phillips’s one (this motion was even noticed by a legal media outlet).

Russell’s straightforward response resulted in a pure hysteria: it is hard to read 4/13/2015 Malibu’s reply in support without experiencing pain from rolling eyes exceedingly hard. As Raul put it in 140 characters or less,

I didn’t elaborate the details of the original Malibu’s Motion for Sanctions. In short, the trolls threw everything they could at the wall in a hope that something would stick. They demanded sanctions based on FRCP 37, 28 U.S.C. § 1927, the court’s inherent authority, FRCP 16, you name it…

We anticipated that the motion would be denied as meritless, but in today’s Report and Recommendations, Magistrate Dinsmore exceeded our hopes: he denied each and every claim, sometimes harshly (“This argument borders on the absurd”), and his thorough arguments didn’t leave a lint of hope for success of possible trolls’ objections to this R&R and/or Bar complaints against Phillips.

¹I deliberately don’t refer to the Bellwether Settlement Conference as a valid precedent.