Court Update: Another One Down. (Plus Receipts.)

 

I Won.

So, I had a trial in Los Angeles against Vivka Grey—one of the people who dogpiled on my ex’s hoax—and I won.

This video’s a report on what happened.

Everything I’m about to say has receipts, including video footage of Viv repeatedly getting caught lying at the end:

• This was a civil trial in LA, I sued Viv for defamation (that is: for not telling the truth) and then she countersued for defamation, saying the same about me. The two cases were mashed into one.
• This whole process took years, so Viv could easily have gained leverage by filing criminal charges after I sued her, but she knew that wouldn’t fly because she was lying.
• The trial itself went on for over a week—nobody came to support Viv and—besides my ex, Viv had no witnesses except 2 of her boyfriends I'd never met.

It was very strange. Viv was out on social media claiming this is a huge trauma and everyone should support her and literally not a single person in Los Angeles could be bothered to show up and sit on her side of the gallery.

(I do want to say I appreciate very much the folks who came out to support me at trial and especially people who took the risk of testifying—hopefully they all know that.)

Anyway, everybody says it's almost impossible to win a defamation trial in the US--but we did.

However, there were some strange impediments to what we could do at trial:

• The judge put a time limit on how long we could go—I’ve heard from other lawyers this is semi normal.
• Our side was meant to go first. (This is also normal)
• So that meant our witnesses went before Viv’s witnesses.
• Now comes the weird part: The point all of our witnesses were making—Sara, Frankie, Michelle, me, etc,—was that Mandy and Viv weren’t honest or reliable people and their stories weren't true. However, in the middle of the trial I was explaining how Mandy was mentally deteriorating and the judge interrupted and said something like “this isn’t proper impeachment, a witness has to testify before you explain she’s not reliable”.
• This was rough—it meant what people who knew Viv and Mandy had to say were basically discounted. So much of what Viv and Mandy said was treated largely at face value, as if no-one contradicted it. It was really confusing.

Lawyers have told me I could’ve appealed the whole trial on this basis, but we won, so that would’ve been weird to spend all that time and effort to appeal a trial you won.

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Even discounting our witnesses, Viv and Mandy’s emails and Facebook messages proved they weren’t telling the truth pretty much immediately.

For example, when they claimed I forced Viv to move in with us we had lots of emails and other communications proving both:

• Viv was enthusiastic about the whole thing —including completely redecorating the living room 
• ...and Viv moved in while Mandy and I were in Montreal, so we couldn’t have forced her to do that.

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It was a total shitshow—Mandy admitted to perjury under oath and her own lawyer fired her so she had to get a new one and Mandy and Viv also made a number of contradictions in their testimony, all from the record:

• Mandy clearly stated multiple times that Mandy herself initiated every single time I had sex with her, and that our sexual encounters always ended when Mandy had an orgasm. 

• Nobody has been able to explain how this fits with the rest of Mandy's story.
• Mandy ex said that you shouldn't believe Michelle's testimony because quote, "She's a stripper they all lie".

• ...and then immediately admitted that yes, both she (Mandy) and VIV were also had both been strippers.
• Although Mandy had testified under oath that every thing Viv accused me of was something she knew to be true, when she was cross examined, Mandy turned 180 and admitted that actually a lot of these things Mandy actually hadn't heard me say or seen me do firsthand. 
• She was just saying that she heard from VIV that this had happened and so believed it and repeated it.
• So her testimony completely changed.
• Mandy also admitted to destroying evidence:

• Mandy and Viv completely disagreed about whether they ever had sex.
• Mandy very strangely is claiming that this girlfriend that she went out with from September until the spring and who lived with her never had sex with her.
• 
  
  
  
  
• ...and Viv says straight up several times that she had sex with me and Mandy--you would think this by itself would pretty much impeach them as witnesses.
• Although Viv claimed under oath that she I had pressured her to have sex with people "of my choosing" she then dialed that back as well.

• Between the two of them, they basically dialed back every damning statement they made in one way or another. 
•  Viv claimed--again weirdly and I don't know why--that I forced her to use sex toys, and she didn't like it and then admits how excited she was to get new batteries to masturbate with her...sex toy. 

• People from the game industry may remember that Mandy claimed I wrote a Tumblr post in her name that was defending me. Mandy admitted that wasn't true.

• Again, old news for a lot of people but Mandy did admit to punching me and we weren't in an argument when she did it. Her excuse was that she was drunk.

• Vivka admitted that the tattoo of her name that I got on my arm was her idea. Despite all of her claims that somehow me calling her girlfriend or being like "I love you" after we went out for seven months or whatever was somehow too fast or rushed or strange.

• Viv's attack post also made a lot of claims about how I was like an objectifying person and was talking about boobs. And, I mean, I can just show you the extensive video evidence there from the time in question. The people bringing up boobs are definitely not me.

My main focus wasn’t getting a big cash award, it was clearing my name. Because of the time limit, we spent all our time focused on proving what Viv said wasn’t true, not talking about money.

As a result, the judge wasn’t convinced that Viv (who had dogpiled on a few days after Mandy’s original statement) did any damage that Mandy hadn’t already done. (This is just LA, everyone argues that all over again in every other jurisdiction.

The net result was that the cash award wasn’t huge but Viv—as the loser—still has to pay all the court costs, which are pretty substantial.

This also gets weird:

• Viv is now trying to plead poverty and get money from her fans to pay these fees, despite the fact Viv repeatedly testified in court that she made about 30,000$ per month on OnlyFans.
• Now she might’ve been lying: Viv has consistently sold her content online by claiming she was in the top whatever percent of creators on OnlyFans and maybe she lied in court because she wanted to keep up this illusion.
• Or maybe she just spent it all on a house or lost on crypto, I don’t know.
• Maybe she never had that much money and was hoping I’d bribe her to shut up, I don’t know.
• Like I said--weird.

Of course she’s also trying to claim I didn’t win in any real way and that lying about being kidnapped and whatever isn’t a big deal.

P.S.

She tried to spin this in a lot of ways, including following the lead of an anonymous 4chan troll named “Skerples” in claiming that there was some kind of sanction against my lawyer.

So that was this:

Mandy, my ex, was supposed to give a deposition—which is like pre-trial testimony—over video chat.

I asked my lawyer and—according to him, anyone can sit in on a deposition—so I asked some of Mandy’s other victims if they wanted to see this: two women wanted to be present, her closest friends-slash-girlfriends from that time, Charlotte Stokely and Michelle Ford.

If Mandy lied during the deposition, they’d be in a position to spot it and help us ask questions to uncover it. So they were there to help.

There’s no rule saying you can’t do this as far as I know.

According to my lawyer in the deposition 

"I’ve got California Civil Procedure Before Trial volume 2 chapter 8 section 8 colon 698 quote absent a protective order, non-parties may attend a deposition indeed it may be necessary or efficient to have a non-party attend”

At any rate, Mandy claimed this was an attempt to intimidate her (she never explained why this would intimidate anyone or what the threat was supposed to be) and so they should reschedule and redo the deposition.

Fighting to keep Michelle and Stokely on during a second deposition seemed not that important and not worth paying lawyers fees to fight over so we just agreed to set up another deposition without them.

The judge then did what Ive learned judges do a lot, which is make one of the the two lawyers pay a fee for spending the courts time on something that didn’t work. The judge had also made Viv’s lawyers pay a fee for wasting the court’s time during the case as well. This is normal, it’s not some felony—and it had nothing to do with me or Charlotte or Michelle despite Viv and the 4chan trll trying to show it as some kind of smoking gun.

So, Yeah...

...that's the story of the trial. And that's why if you hear Mandy, Viv, or their followers say anything you probably shouldn't believe it.

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