by Tucker Max
According to Ms. Johnson, Tucker Max exploited her image and published scurrilous lies about her on his web site just to sell T-shirts and other merchandise. Last month, a Florida judge ordered a temporary injunction against Max forcing him to take down all references to “Katy Johnson” and “Miss Vermont” on his web site.
“I feel vindicated by the judge’s decision, and I hope this suit will put an end to the ugly untruths he parades on this reprehensible web site. Since the lawsuit began, I have been contacted by other victims of his lies who have offered their support,” said Ms. Johnson.
Ms. Johnson says Max’s assertions published on his web site that she is a “whore” and a “prostitute” are malicious, false and hurtful. She vehemently denies the story about her on the web site.
“I never intended to be a champion of privacy rights or become involved in First Amendment issues; to me this is about Right vs. Wrong, and he was wrong to attack my reputation on the Internet for no other reason than his own commercial gain.”
Ms. Johnson says that she did not file the lawsuit out of vengeance but to stop further damage to her reputation and others. Her biggest concern was that little girls trying to visit her web site to see the Starrlettes or Miss Vermont web sites for pageant information were being diverted by search engines to Max’s depraved web site.
She filed the lawsuit under FL Statutes 540.08, which prevents unauthorized use of name or likeness and provides for punitive damages and royalties, in order to get swift justice through an injunction and conclude the lawsuit quickly. Ms. Johnson says that Max has willfully violated the injunction since it was issued, and she intends to go back to court to find him in contempt. “This person is greatly harming me by the way he is associating my name with his immoral web site and the disgusting products he promotes.”
Ms. Johnson, a member of MENSA, is a columnist for Pageantry Magazine and author of “True Beauty: A Sunny Face Means A Happy Heart.” She will be appearing on the MTV documentary “MADE” on June 28, as a coach who has one month to turn a tomboy into a beauty queen. Katy’s cartoon web site, katyjohnson.com, promotes character for 8 to 12-year-old girls through her Starrlettes comic strip.
And no, I did not make up the part of the press release that reads, “Ms. Johnson, a member of MENSA.” I wish I had, because it might be the funniest line in any of my books.
But it gets even better. I was served papers a few days later and read the actual lawsuit. All the case materials are online (www.tuckermax.com/missvermont), and you can read them yourself if you hate your life. There is a reason I never went to class in law school and people pay lawyers to do this shit—it’s boring as fuck. I will try to explain everything in the plainest language possible. She sued me for three different things:
Unauthorized use of likeness: She accused me of selling things with her name or likeness on them, without her permission. This was just silly. I did have affiliate links to buy t-shirts on my site, but the shirts themselves had nothing to do with her in any way.
Invasion of privacy: This is a common law tort, which accuses me of making private facts about Katy public, by publishing them to the public at large. In plain language, she is saying I told everyone her secrets.
Battery: She accuses me of civil battery—hitting her, basically. There were no details to this baseless accusation in the legal filing of course, because it was not only a lie, but it was nothing more than a jurisdictional ploy. Basically, this was their way of trying to make me resolve the case in Florida court instead of having it moved to a court in Illinois (jurisdictional issues are big deals in most lawsuits, but are so tedious if I took the time to explain them to you, you’d burn this book and then try to fight me).
That’s it. That’s everything she sued me for. When I first learned about the lawsuit, I assumed by her statements—like any normal human being would—that she’d be contesting the truth of my story. And honestly, I was kind of excited about that. I had intentionally left out anything even remotely debatable and only put in the events with witnesses or pictures—her behavior at the wedding, her blowing me in the bathroom, the gun target, etc. I was more than willing to defend the truth of my story in a court of law. Then I saw her actual pleading—no mention of libel, defamation, slander … there is NOTHING in her lawsuit that actually contests the truth of the story.
I repeat for emphasis: The lawsuit NEVER accuses me of saying anything untrue about Katy. In fact, in order for count #2 to be valid, what I say about her has to be true. Her lawsuit is, in effect, legally admitting that my story is true, and then taking the position that I didn’t have the right to say it.
Katy’s lawyer was using a very shrewd legal strategy that allowed them to deny the facts of my case to the press, but never actually put the facts of what happened in front of a court of law. By not suing me for libel, the only issues were technical aspects of the law, and NOT the truth of the story. This strategy is what you would use ONLY if you’re trying to hide something and silence a voice you don’t want to hear. And though it was within the letter of the law, it was so far outside its spirit that the whole thing verged on immoral and unethical chicanery. More importantly, what it meant was that Katy knew what was up, she was just trying to intimidate me into taking my story down.
I’ll never forget the moment I came to the realization that this was no longer about truth. This was someone trying to use power and influence in an illegitimate and unethical way to bully me into shutting up, to silence the truth and steal my liberty from me.
What the fuck? I live in America, right? This shit isn’t supposed to happen here, is it?
Well, it was happening to me. And if I didn’t do something about it, I was going to get fucked. Make no mistake about it, this was a big deal, and this was a serious attack not only on my First Amendment rights, but on anyone who published truth on the internet.
I may have gone to a top ten law school, but this shit was beyond my ability. I needed a great lawyer, one, you know, who actually took the bar. I went to the best internet First Amendment lawyer I could find, a guy named John Carey. He was very interested in the case, discussed it thoroughly with me, and I was impressed. This dude got it. He would be able to help justice prevail. He was even willing to do it at a steep discount, but he wouldn’t do it without getting paid something, at least, a $7,000 retainer to start.
I checked my bank account. I had $44. Freedom is not free, indeed.
I was fucked. But my fucking went deeper than my account balance. It went to the core of all my decisions in the two years between when I met MissVermont and when she sued me. Let me explain:
I met MissVermont in the summer of 2001, right after I graduated from Duke and moved to Florida to work for my father. The summer before, I’d hated being a lawyer so much that it only took me three weeks of acting like a complete asshole to get fired (that is the charity auction story from IHTSBIH). It didn’t take too much longer than that for me to hate the restaurant business and get fired from there as well. The only thing that was different was how and by whom I was fired.
When I got to South Florida, my dad’s entire company was fucked up. All the stuff my dad saw was great: the restaurants ran really well, he was making money, customers were happy, etc. But the backend of the business was a total shitshow. Costs were way out of whack and the mid-level employees were thieves and liars who didn’t care about the business as much as they did about massaging my dad’s ego so they could keep leeching off of him. I figured this out quickly, and realized immediately how to turn the business around. I could get rid of the shitty employees, reconfigure the backend to make everything more efficient, renegotiate contracts with vendors and reduce prices—I could, in effect, add all sorts of value by bringing it into the 21st century.
I made a major error in implementing my plan, one that is totally obvious in retrospect: I TOLD all the toxic middle management thieves all about my great plans. As quickly as I had realized that they were the problem, they figured out t
hat most of my plan would involve either firing them or cutting off their gravy train. I didn’t care though; I thought that because my plan was the right one, and my name was on the door, my father would back me over them. [Adding to this scorched earth tactical blunder was the fact that I had done enough reckless shit—like having MissVermont blow me in the bathroom—to give them ammunition to use against me.]
One day my dad sat me down to talk about some recent issues in the restaurant. I thought he was going to discuss a way to at least solve the problems. I was wrong.
Father “Tucker, I’m going to have let you go.”
Yes, you read that right. My father fired me from the family business because he picked his ass-kissing employees over his own son.
As I sat there and listened to his bullshit rationalizations for why he was doing this, something became crystal clear to me:
The disease does not cause itself. The employees weren’t the problem. And even though I’d approached this wrong, I wasn’t even the problem. The problem was my father. His employees were able to act the way they did because he’d implicitly allowed it for years. Those toxic shitheads knew my father better than me. I thought the best of him, but they understood he actually wanted employees who kissed his ass, not people who had ambition to do things the right way. At 25, I was still naive enough to think life and business were about truth; they knew it was really about feeding the egos of those above you. They gave him what he wanted and I didn’t, so he protected them and not me.
It was nice to understand this, even if it was a little late, but regardless of how right I may have been, I gotta be honest: It was pretty shitty to have my own dad fire me from the family business. This meant—after also getting fired from my law firm—that I’d now failed at the two things I was supposed to have been training for in college and grad school. That sucked, and those failures forced me to really examine my life, and ask myself some hard questions:
What kind of life did I want to lead? One I loved, one I was proud of and that made me happy … or a life that other people told me I was “supposed” to lead but I hated?
What kind of person was I going to be? Just another sheep, another cog in the machine, working a crappy job I couldn’t stand … or was I going to be the type of person who blazed my own trail and made an awesome life I loved living?
I realized I had a choice to make: swallow my pride, go back to the corporate machine, and try to be a lawyer or a businessman, but this time make sure I acted like a sheep and did it their way … or do something where I carved my own path in life and didn’t have to eat anyone else’s shit. Something I really loved doing.
Looking at it that way, there wasn’t really a choice. I had to leave that world and go create my own life. It came down to one simple thing for me: Every day I have to wake up and look at myself in the mirror, and if I’m not excited to live the day in front of me, proud of who I am and what I’m spending my time doing … then what’s the fucking point?
It took a while to figure out what I wanted to do (that’s a whole different story), but in August of 2002, I moved to Chicago and started writing full time. I did nothing but dedicate myself to my work. I refused to get a “normal” job to support myself, only doing side things to cover bills (like teaching for Princeton Review). For me, it was sink or swim.
By May 1, 2003—despite a lot of initial setbacks—my site had officially blown up. I had hundreds of thousands of readers, I had been featured on MTV, I had girls coming to me for sex (like it should have been all along). I’d bet everything on myself, taken a series of immense risks, almost failed, and here I was, making it. It was the greatest feeling in the world.
There was only one problem: money. My small savings had run out real fast. This was 2002/2003, remember. People were just starting to get real-world famous for their writing on the Internet, but no one was making any money at it. No shit, it got to the point where I was eating ramen on the days I was lucky enough to eat at all.
With that backstory, you understand my mindset and my financial position in May of 2003. So, on the verge of getting everything I wanted, here comes the MissVermont lawsuit, threatening to take everything away. The most frustrating part was that even though I was right, even though I had truth on my side, it didn’t matter. I needed a lawyer to defend that truth, and if I couldn’t find the $7,000 to hire him, MissVermont was going to beat me simply by manipulating the law. She was lying, threatening my future as a writer with her flagrant hypocrisy, and she was going to win … by default.
But where the fuck do I get $7,000? I had $44 in my bank account. Yeah, tons of people read my writing and knew my name, but none of them were paying me (this was also a few years before my book came out). I had nowhere else to turn, so I did the only thing I could do:
I humiliated myself, and went to my father. I begged him to put up the money for the retainer.
Even though my father had fired me from the family business because he’s an insecure narcissist who picked his sycophants over his own son, he’s not an evil monster—he understood how fucked I was, and he agreed to help me. But he put a condition on his financial assistance to me:
In return for him paying for my legal defense, I had to promise him I would drop my dreams of being a writer, start studying for the bar, take it, and then go to work as a lawyer.
You see, my dad was fixated on me “doing something” with my life, and the only way he could see that happening was “putting my education to use” by becoming a lawyer. That’s one of the main reasons I even went to law school at all—because my dad wanted me to be a lawyer. It fit his image of success for me. When I moved to Chicago to become a writer, he was pissed at me because there was no place for “struggling writer” within his image of success for his son. He did want me to succeed at life—it was just that his notion of success was vastly different from mine, and now he had the leverage he needed to get me to go back into the law, something I had left because I hated it.
In order to save my dream of becoming a writer … I had to give my dream up. The irony is so fucking thick it makes me sick.
I took the deal. What choice did I have? Sometimes you have to cut the deal with the devil. It was so fucking depressing, but he paid the retainer, and as usually happens once you take the devil’s deal, shit immediately started going right:
I complied with the court order and took “The MissVermont Story” off my website—only because my lawyer insisted—which inspired about 100 other sites to host the story. My original MissVermont story went from what was essentially a completely anonymous story on some random website, to being the most read thing on the Internet for a week or two. By suing me, dumbass Katy Johnson attracted 1,000x more attention to me and my story than it would have gotten on its own. I became a First Amendment hero, to the point where even the ACLU filed an amicus brief on my behalf (essentially saying that my side of the position was the right one).
My lawyers did what they said they would: They smoked Katy’s dumbass lawyer. They called his bluff. Since Katy Johnson went on record as saying that this story was so harmful to her reputation, and needed it to be taken down immediately, we filed a brief asking for expedited discovery.
“Discovery” is the portion of a court case where the two sides get to have their lawyers interview the witnesses from the other side and examine all their relevant files. What this meant was that my lawyer would be able to sit down and ask Katy all sorts of questions about the facts of the case—ON THE RECORD. This would mean she would have to tell the truth, under penalty of perjury, about everything I wrote in my story.
So if she denied, say, sucking my dick in the bathroom of Max’s Grille, then I would bring in the waiters who walked in on us. Or if she denied anything about the wedding, I’d bring in the guests. It would put every single fact of my story under legal scrutiny—which is what I wanted, because I was telling the truth and she was lying. [And not only that, but my lawyer would ask her about exactly WHY she was no longer
at Stetson law school, which would mean—on the record—she’d have to explain the whole story behind her decision to send envelopes of fake anthrax to her own mother.]
As soon as we did that, Katy sent me an email asking me to settle the case. Oh no, honey, I WANT discovery. I WANT you to answer these questions. Let’s bring it ALL into the light and bathe in truth.
Pretty predicable what happened next: They dropped their case against me, without a whimper or any bullshit news stories or press releases. Since then, I’ve heard nothing from Katy or her lawyer.
I won. I fought for my freedom and won.
But that wasn’t the last battle I had to fight. I’d promised my dad I would quit this “writing thing” and go take the bar and be a lawyer. For two months, I tried to keep my word to him. I started studying for the bar. I got my bar application and started filling it out. The Illinois Bar application has to be typed or printed out, and I didn’t have a printer, so I had to go to the Lincoln Park library and use their typewriters. That’s right, MECHANICAL FUCKING TYPEWRITERS.
I’ll never forget the day I went there to type out my bar application. Sitting in this tiny, moldy smelling room, as I punched away on this ancient machine, I felt sicker and sicker. Physically ill, like I had been gut-punched. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t—I ended up vomiting in the trashcan. I didn’t have the flu or anything. This was my body sending me an unmistakable message.
I threw away all the bar materials and left the library. I told my dad I wasn’t taking the bar, I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I was going to pursue my dream and be a writer, regardless of what he said or did. It was my life to live the way I wanted to live it, right or wrong. I told him I was sorry I went back on my word, but I wasn’t going to have my life held hostage by his desires. I promised I’d pay him back the $7,000 when I could afford to.