A federal judge has dramatically raised the stakes of an upcoming hearing on alleged misconduct by porn copyright trolling firm Prenda Law. The hearing, scheduled for Monday in Los Angeles, was originally slated to focus on the actions of Prenda attorney Brett Gibbs. But in documents filed last month, Gibbs denied wrongdoing, blaming all of his alleged misconduct on his superiors. So on Tuesday, US District Judge Otis Wright ordered seven additional people connected to Prenda to report to his courtroom and explain themselves.
More precisely, Wright expanded Monday's hearing to include six more real people and one person who may not exist. A Minnesota man named Alan Cooper has accused Prenda of naming him the CEO of a litigious shell company called AF Holdings. Prenda insists Cooper's allegations are false, so Judge Wright has ordered both Alan Coopers to appear in his courtroom next Monday. Now, Prenda's senior officials will either have to produce a second Alan Cooper or explain to Judge Wright, in person, why they were unable to do so.
A terrible soap opera
Some television dramas have complex plots involving so many characters that fans have created elaborate charts to keep the characters and their relationships straight. Defense attorney Morgan Pietz was experiencing a similar difficulty keeping track of all the entities affiliated with Prenda Law, so he created an elaborate chart and filed it as an exhibit to a Monday legal filing:
The "characters" in the Prenda soap opera are listed in the upper left. John Steele and Paul Hansmeier originally founded a law firm called Steele and Hansmeier. According to Gibbs, the firm sold its book of business to a new firm called Prenda Law in 2011. A lawyer named Paul Duffy is nominally the principal of Prenda, but critics say Steele and Hansmeier are still secretly pulling Prenda's strings.
An operative named Mark Lutz has been named as an official in a variety of Prenda-related companies. In November, a Florida federal judge blasted him for "attempted fraud on the court," for claiming to represent a pornography producer when he was unable to even name the porn company's officers. More recently, Gibbs named Lutz as a successor to "Alan Cooper," the CEO of the shell companies AF Holdings and Ingenuity 13.
Someone named "Salt Marsh" has been named in corporate documents as an officer of AF Holdings. Pietz has suggested that this is not a real person, but rather a reference to Anthony Saltmarsh, the "live-in boyfriend" of John Steele's sister Jayme.
In Pietz's view, the fact that so many Prenda "clients" are all staffed by the same handful of individuals with close ties to Steele or Hansmeier is evidence that they are not independent entities at all. Rather, the proliferation of shell companies is, well, a shell game, designed to shield Prenda's real principals from accountability for their ethically questionable activities.
Judge Wright has ordered seven of the nine individuals on Pietz's chart, including the possibly imaginary Alan Cooper, to report to his courtroom on Monday. These include Duffy and Steele, who recently filed defamation lawsuits against their online critics. Having all of Prenda's senior officials in one room will make it much easier for Wright to get straight answers to his questions.
But Brett Gibbs, who was originally slated to face Judge Wright alone at Monday's hearing, likely won't be singing from Prenda's hymnal. As the chart above indicates, Gibbs has been heavily involved in Prenda's business activities for years. But last month, he lawyered up and began blaming his actions on his superiors at Prenda. In a Monday filing, he stated that "I no longer have a relationship with Prenda Law."
He didn't elaborate on whether Prenda fired him or whether he made a strategic decision to put as much distance as possible between himself and the troubled firm.
Ars will be reporting from court on Monday.
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