Tex Abuse

At 2:09 PM on the afternoon of August 24, 2022. Tommy filed his reply to my response to his TCPA motion to dismiss my libel lawsuit.

Filing a reply-to-a-response in a civil lawsuit in Texas is not mandatory; in fact, judges don’t even have to consider them. They’re required to consider motions and responses, but they basically don’t have to read replies to those responses unless they’re in the mood.

But I knew that Tommy would file a reply. And not only did I know that Tommy would file a reply, I knew when he would file it. The hearing was scheduled for the next morning at 10 AM – so I figured that Tommy would file his reply the previous afternoon (less than 20 hours before the hearing was scheduled to start), so I wouldn’t have time to create and file a sur-reply (which is a reply to a reply to a response to a motion).

Tommy’s logic was tortured, and I’m not going to subject you to most of it, but here are a few of the highlights:

• Tommy said that I failed to prove that I didn’t expose myself. He was right, as far as that goes: In fact, I had said that I couldn’t prove that I did not do something because it’s impossible to prove a negative. Tommy claimed that didn’t matter – because I had failed to provide any evidence (emphasis in the original) that I had not committed a sex crime, “Plaintiff has now exposed himself to a compulsory dismissal of claims and a mandatory award of attorney’s fees.”

• Tommy said that his accusation that I exposed myself lacked “defamatory meaning.” He mounted a surprise counterattack by saying that I had deliberately misinterpreted what he meant when he said that I had “exposed myself,” and that I had applied “an out-of-context, deviant definition to that phrase.” It seemed to me that Tommy was “reminding” the judge that I was a deviant (an insult that typically implies sexual abnormality or perversion) while leaving himself some plausible deniability, in that he could claim that I had deliberately misinterpreted that phrase, too.

• Tommy said that he was protected by privilege even if he had deliberately libeled me. “Even the intentional falsity of such a statement or the malice from which it originated does not strip the privilege,” he insisted. I had maintained that his accusation of a sexual offense was not protected because it bore no relation to his trespass charge, but Tommy claimed that it actually was related, because it was a statement about what I ostensibly had done during my trespass. So apparently any libel would be protected as long as Tommy accused me of having done it while I was trespassing on Sonia’s property.

It was mid-afternoon, and the hearing was scheduled for the next morning. Did I really want to take the time to create and submit a “sur-reply” to Tommy’s response?

You’ll have to read the next chapter to get a definitive answer to that question, but I’ll give you a hint: My father used to introduce me as “my argumentative son.”

Document Links
My libel petition
Tommy’s TCPA motion to dismiss
My response to Tommy’s TCPA motion to dismiss
Tommy’s reply to my response to Tommy’s TCPA motion