When last we checked in on Meghan McCain’s legal battle with conservative blog RedState, her lawyers were threatening the site over a parody of her columns by a user named “Totally Meghan McCain.” RedState may have taken the posts down, but the author, Leon Wolf, is taking his act to Pajamas Media and calling out McCain for “bullying” in a letter to her attorney.
“My client will not be bullied out of exercising his First Amendment right to make clear his belief that your client is a spoiled, brainless twit who is cheapening the political discourse in this country,” Wolf’s attorney wrote. “Therefore, henceforth, the ‘Totally Meghan McCain’ series may be found at http://pajamasmedia.com for your client’s reading pleasure.”
The letter noted that legal precedent is well established for protecting parodies from lawsuits. Bolstering Wolf’s case, it noted that even McCain herself referred to his work as a parody on Twitter, which undercut her claim that that the post was a false representation of her name that confused readers. From the letter:
Of course, the subject matter of your letter is a fairly obvious parody to any
person of even barely functional literacy. Thus – and your client probably didn’t tell you
this – even she recognized that the posts were parodies (or “parody’s,” as she put it). At
approximately 8:25 p.m. EDT on September 17th, your client posted to her Twitter feed,
“I don’t care about parody’s(sic) or fake names – but falsely putting my name on
someone else’s writing is illegal.” She then subsequently deleted this Tweet, presumably
when someone told her that “parody’s” were constitutionally protected and it might look
bad in a subsequent lawsuit if she were caught admitting in public that these posts were
obvious parodies. Not to worry: My client has screenshots.
We reached out to McCain’s lawyer for comment and will post his response. You can read the full letter here.
