The @Popehat Reign of Terror and the Censorious Douchebag Charles Carreon

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Charles Carreon on Bloomberg News, March 2012.

“See, a legal threat like the one Charles Carreon sent — ‘shut up, delete your criticism of my client, give me $20,000, or I’ll file a federal lawsuit against you’ — is unquestionably a form of bullying. . . .
“Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it. And so Carreon supports bullying like that. He’s got a license to do it.”
— Ken White, Popehat.com, June 13, 2012

Somebody informed me that my name appears in a list of “rapers” who have allegedly victimized Brett Kimberlin:

Brett Kimberlin — obtained peace order prohibiting blogger Aaron Walker (Worthing) from writing about him (convicted domestic terrorist, bomber, perjurer; wounded a man so badly he later took his own life; laughed off the judgment; made vague and undocumented claims that he suffered threats from unidentified people; astoundingly vile; terrifyingly sociopathic; leads a contemptible life; crazy; quite evil; victimizer; malevolent; outrageous; despicable; remorseless and amoral psycho; crazy stalker) (Rapers: Aaron Walker, Patterico’s Pontifications; Eugene Volokh; Ali A. Akbar of the National Bloggers Club; Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP; Robert Stacy McCain)

This list was evidently compiled by Charles Carreon, whom I’d never heard of before, but who seems to be an infamous douchebag.

Not infamous enough, yet.

Is Charles Carreon a pervert? Does he hang around middle-school playgrounds selling heroin to children? No one has ever made any such accusation against him. Nor, as far as I know, is there any reason to believe that Charles Carreon is a serial killer with a basement dungeon and the bones of prostitutes buried in his backyard.

No, he’s just a douchebag. And a big-shot lawyer.

But I repeat myself.

So there are two humor sites, The Oatmeal and FunnyJunk, and the proprietor of the former site said the latter site was ripping him off. At which point, the proprietor of the FunnyJunk hired Tucson, Arizona, lawyer Charles Carreon to send a letter to Matt Inman, proprietor of The Oatmeal, accusing him of damaging FunnyJunk’s reputation and threatening a federal lawsuit, a letter that ended thus:

Accordingly, demand is hereby made upon you to perform the following remedial acts on or before June 12, 2012:

  • Remove all mention of FunnyJunk and FunnyJunk.com from TheOatmeal.com from your website and any other website over which you have control.
  • Deliver to me a check in the amount of $20,000 payable to the order of FunnyJunk LLC.

I look forward to your prompt response.
Very truly yours,
Charles Carreon

He got a “prompt response,” all right — arguably the most hilarious “fuck you” in the history of the Internet.

Popehat.com proprietor Ken White is a famed defender of online free speech. His immediate response included this:

Their lawyer has just given himself +eleventy in “censorious twatwaffle” on Klout, and the Streisand Effect is looming.
Pack it up and go home, FunnyJunk. This isn’t going to turn out well for you. . . .
Fuck him. He’s vermin. He’s not forgivable. Let any good he has ever done be wiped out. Let the name “Charles Carreon” be synonymous with petulant, amoral censorious douchebaggery.

Indeed, and Charles Carreon cooperated admirably, doubling down over and over — chasing his losses, as a gambler would say. A guy created a site mocking Charles Carreon. That led to threats and a lawsuit and Carreon was eventually handed his own ass in federal court:

Today [April 12, 2013] a federal judge in the Northern District of California granted the motion for fees by the satirical blogger, granting $46,100.25 in fees to the blogger’s attorneys, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and attorney and blogger Cathy Gellis. They had been seeking a total of $77,765.25.
Judge United States District Judge Richard Seeborg’s order awarding fees is devastating to Carreon. Judge Seeborg rejects Carreon’s arguments one by one, and finds Carreon’s litigation conduct rendered the case exceptional . . .

 The key to understanding this is Charles Carreon’s sense of entitlement. He is a big-shot lawyer and therefore entitled to a good reputation, so if people say mean things about him on the Internet, Charles Carreon believes he has been wrongly deprived of something that is rightfully his. He whined to NBC News after The Oatmeal mocked him:

“I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails,” he says.
“I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat — I’ve never really seen it before,” Carreon explains. “I don’t like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant.”

Is Charles Carreon’s mother a “sexual deviant”? I’d never heard that before, but now that you mention it — and hey, Charles, you invited me to your reign-of-terror pity party, remember? — your mother being a sexual deviant might explain a lot of things.

Ken White offers apologies for his reign of terror, but who’s going to apologize for all those hookers who have disappeared from the streets of Tucson in recent years, huh? And what about the epidemic of heroin addiction among Arizona middle schoolers?

No one has accused Charles Carreon of dealing heroin or carving up kidnapped prostitutes in his basement torture dungeon — he’s never even been suspected of such things — and if anybody has a hunch that the hard drive on Charles Carreon’s laptop is crammed full of illegal pornography, they’ve never mentioned this to me.

As for the alleged sexual deviancy of Charles Carreon’s mother, I’ve double-checked that NBC article, and he didn’t deny it, did he?

We know of no actual evidence for any such allegations, and he probably doesn’t have a torture dungeon in his basement, although you never know about such things. Most of Ariel Castro‘s neighbors in Cleveland thought he was just a law-abiding citizen and at least Ariel Castro never threatened to sue a blogger for $20,000.

Charles Carreon is in the Douchebag Hall of Fame because of his own actions. He refuses to accept responsibility for this, however. Instead he shifts blame onto scapegoats, demonizing Ken White and others and, in the process, causing me to take notice of his censorious douchebaggery.

He chose poorly — again.

 

67 comments

  2. You seem to get an interesting type of crazy people. But “raper”, kind of pushed the limit over the line into defamation, didn’t it?

  3. If I sued everybody who said bad things about me on the Internet, I’d never have time to blog.

    This hyperlitigious “sue somebody” mentality, that views tort law as the solution to every problem, creates problems that would not otherwise exist.

  4. Wasn’t really thinking about the suing part, I was just surprised a supposed lawyer, with a “good reputation” would be so blatant in making such an accusation.

  6. Charles Carreon is only a big shot lawyer in his own mind. He wrote and self-published the book about his “big” case. While he was first licensed to practice law in California in 1987, he has only been licensed to practice in Arizona since February 12, 2013. His current office address is also his home address. The house has no basement.

  10. Did anyone warn him about trying to out-crazy Stacy McCain? No?

    Well, the sight of you tap-dancing merrily upon the line, periodically blowing raspberries and sticking your thumbs in your ears while waggling your fingers, mocking and taunting him, might be a gentle hint.

    Enjoy!

  18. What?!? (*gasping doubletake*)

    Another person blaming all of their problems on everyone else?

    I figured there couldn’t be more than like, three of those. Plus barack.

  19. Obviously, since he proved too stupid to not make himself $40K poorer by not knowing When To Leave Well Enough Alone.

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