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.

The hearing on Tommy’s motion to dismiss was scheduled for the next morning at 10 AM – so if I wanted to respond to Tommy’s reply, I had to do it by the end of the day.

A response to a reply to a response to a motion to dismiss a lawsuit is called a sur-reply. “Sur” is a compressed form of the Latin super, meaning “over; above; in addition to; supplementary.” So a sur-reply is an additional reply that is filed in response to the “normal” reply. (For those of you keeping score: A sur-reply is sometimes called a sur-response. Sometimes it’s hyphenated, and sometimes it’s not.)

I assumed (but did not know for a fact) that I had to file my sur-reply before midnight in order for it to be considered at the hearing the next day. But I didn’t want to stay up that late, because I had to drive to the courthouse early the next morning.

And so at 9:29 PM, exactly 7 hours and 20 minutes after Tommy had filed his reply, I filed my sur-reply. It was fairly short (only four pages long) – but hey, it was literally the best I could do on short notice.

Because it was a short document, here’s a short summary:

• Tommy claimed that my entire response had been based on hypotheticals. However, a quick analysis of my response revealed that I had devoted only 2.5% of it to hypotheticals. So Tommy was off by a mere 97.5%.

• Tommy claimed that I had “conceded” that I couldn’t prove that his contention that I had exposed myself was false. I pointed out that Tommy had repeatedly admitted that I had not exposed myself, so it seemed to me that he was actually the one who had conceded that his statement was false.

• Tommy claimed that I shouldn’t have confined my libel complaint to the phrase “exposing himself,” as if somehow the context in which it appeared might have rendered Tommy’s charge less defamatory. He called my interpretation of that phrase “deviant” – which, I pointed out, was not only false, it emphasized Tommy’s tendency to hurl words loaded with negative sexual connotations at me, in what I thought was a continuing attempt to bully and intimidate me.

• To be protected by the Judicial Proceedings Privilege, a defamatory statement must be relevant to the subject matter of the lawsuit. Tommy claimed that anything he accused me of doing while I was trespassing was automatically related to his trespassing counterclaim, so his claim that I had exposed myself was magically protected. This circular reasoning made no sense to me, and I was hoping that the judge would feel the same way.

Was this starting to sound repetitive? Answer: Yes, it was. Were we basically just going back and forth and exchanging the same charges and countercharges? Answer: Yes, we were.

We could probably have gone on like that for a long time. After all, Tommy’s law firm had a large staff of paralegals, and I didn’t have anything else to do. But the law said that Tommy couldn’t file any kind of response to my sur-reply, which made my sur-reply the last word in this particular exchange. I guess that, because I filed the lawsuit, I was the home team, so I got the final at-bat.

I managed to finish up and submit my sur-reply a little before 9:30 PM. Then I reviewed my notes for the hearing the next morning and laid out my clothes for my big day in court. (OK, Donna laid out my clothes. If it had been left up to me, I might have shown up in court wearing purple pants and an orange shirt.)

I tried to relax so I’d be able to get some sleep and I wouldn’t look like a zombie at the hearing tomorrow. But even if that had happened, thanks to Donna, at least I’d have looked like a well-dressed zombie.

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