Long-time Popehat readers may remember the persistently loathsome Dennis Toeppen and his what-if-you-had-a-racist-vexatious-litigant-bus-company Suburban Express, which services University of Illinois-Champaign. I wrote about them in April 2013, when he sued a bunch of university students in a distant small claims court, sued students for criticism, threatened defamation suits for criticizing their litigation campaign, and generally acted completely unbalanced. I wrote again in July 2013, when Suburban Express and Toeppen doubled down on defamation threats against critics, and again in July 2014, when Toeppen was charged with misdemeanor cyberstalking.

It's remarkable that Suburban Express has survived given how absolutely awful its reputation has become, especially after a Dennis-Toeppen-acting-like-Dennnis-Toeppen incident in which Suburban Expressed advertised that you should ride with them because you won't encounter so many Chinese people. Now the Attorney General for the State of Illinois has gotten involved. The Attorney General actually sued Toeppen and Suburban Express, alleging violations of state and federal civil rights and consumer protection laws. The complaint is rather shocking. The AG asserts that Suburban Express and Toeppen actively discriminate against Asians and Jews: that they create online pages ridiculing and attacking complaining customers on racial grounds, that they offered an explicitly anti-Asian advertisement and then offered a non-apology asserting "we're not comfortable with the idea of selling our university to the highest foreign bidder," that they advertise Suburban Express as featuring "passengers who look like you and are like you," that their internal communications ridicule Asians, and that the internal communications ridicule Jews (e.g. "a trip to the land of no ham"). The AG also cites Suburban Express' and Toeppen's online abuse of customers who anger them: they create web pages attacking and insulting customers with whom they have disputes and displaying their personal information like names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses; they ban customers for bizarre and arbitrary reasons ("sounds like a bitch" "negative yelp review, peanut allergy"); that they have form contracts with abusive and illegal terms (such as prohibitions on negative reviews or online criticism), and that they file scores of petty suits in deliberately inconvenient locations to attack complaining customers. In short, they're a nightmare. The AG kept receipts; they included 182 pages of damning exhibits.

It's not looking promising for Toeppen or Suburban Express in court. They agreed to a Temporary Restraining Order barring them from publishing the personal identifying information of customers, required them to take down the personal identifying information they already published, revise their lawsuits to redact gratuitously filed personal identifying information, and stop retaliating against customers for online reviews. Toeppen and Suburban Express agreed to have that order extended a few times, and now the AG wants to make it into a more long-term injunction. Meanwhile the attorney for Suburban Express and Toeppen wants to quit, citing strategic disputes and non-payment. Toeppen is falling back on the game-winning strategy of semi-coherent attacks on the media.

Dennis Toeppen is the heart of this story. He's the answer to the question "what if That Dude from the YouTube comments ran a business that impacted a whole bunch of people?" He seems, charitably, disturbed. He's in federal court now — no longer merely the court of public opinion or the distant small-claims court he uses to strongarm customers — and it will not end well for him.

Last 5 posts by Ken White