"A horse walks into a bar" may be the opening to one of the greatest jokes ever, but the law school student who used it as his online moniker wants to walk out of a defamation lawsuit filed by two female Yale law students, who say he is one of a posse of anonymous, online haters who harassed them for months on a law school message board on AutoAdmit.com.
The Jane Doe plaintiffs contend that the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers. They filed suit in federal court in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands in damages and subpoenas to unmask the real identities of the anonymous posters.
But Ryan Mariner -- a Fordham law school student who used the "A horse walks into a bar" name to post at AutoAdmit -- is now asking a federal judge to dismiss the case against him, saying that the two crass comments he made do not constitute harassment.
While admitting that the some of the allegation are heinous, Mariner says that the lawyers for the anonymous Yale law students have caused him a long face by needlessly entangled him in a bizarre legal machinations.
In a. Aug. 13 court filing (.pdf), Mariner's lawyer wrote:
Mariner admits that in a thread started by someone expressing a desire to have sex with one of the plaintiffs, he added the comment "get in line" and later in the same thread, that he would "make a sundae (including (but not limited to) whip cream, chocolate sauce, sprinkles, and a cherry."
But his lawyer argues that's hardly enough to add Mariner to a federal lawsuit alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress.
"No allegations are made that these two isolated comments created a foreseeable risk of severe emotional distress, that the distress from Mariner's comments was severe enough that ti might result in bodily harm or that any severe distress was related to these specific comments," the motion reads.
Mariner isn't the first to complain that the women's lawyers -- Yale's David Rosen and Stanford's Mark Lemley -- are playing games by not serving the suit (.pdf) on known plaintiffs.
The lawyers for the two women originally named one of AutoAdmit's administrators, Anthony Ciolli, then a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania, as a defendant -- even though Congress intentionally shielded electronic-service providers from responsibility for what their users post online.
Ciolli's former lawyer, Marc Randazza, says Ciolli never wrote anything defamatory, and was named in the lawsuit simply for leverage, in an effort to get the site owner to change how disturbing material was handled on AutoAdmit.
Lemley did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but earlier this month told Threat Level that they had identified several defendants and are in the process of settling with some of them.
Photo: Flickr/http://missrightwing
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