We Hunted the Mammoth needs your support to survive! Please drop a few bucks here or here if you can.
One backwards-baseball-cap-wearing Chicago dudebro’s campaign to enact legal revenge on women who called him “clingy” and a “psycho” online has ended in ignominious defeat: yesterday, a Federal judge dismissed his second amended legal complaint against these women and dozens of other defendants with prejudice.
Nikko D’Ambrosio’s apparently very incompetent lawyers filed his first lawsuit in January of last year, alleging that several women who had dated him had said mean and defamatory things about him in a private Facebook group devoted to calling out guys who date very badly.
In posts on the Chicago version of the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” group, one woman complained that he had been “[v]ery clingy very fast. Flaunted money very awkwardly and kept talking about how I don’t want to see his bad side, especially when he was on business calls.” Another called him a “psycho.” Still another said that he had ghosted her after the two had sex. The first woman posted his picture and mentioned his first name, and shared a text message she said she had gotten from him, which I have lightly censored:
Speak for yourself you ugly vial [sic] fake whore. Your ego matches that fake fucking face where you can’t even smile in pictures because your teeth are so fucked. The truth hurts bitch and my message will stay with you forever c*nt.
So, yeah, this is the guy who thinks it’s defamatory to call him a “psycho.”
Anyway, so not only was the defamation case somewhat silly–these women were basically expressing their opinions, and making a few claims about him that his lawyers didn’t actually challenge directly in the suit–but his lawyers arguably fucked up pretty much everything about the complaint that they could possibly fuck up.
Among other things, they didn’t just sue the women who had made the comments about him; they sued nearly two dozen other women and one man, including relatives of one of the women who had posted comments. They also sued multiple different corporate incarnations of Facebook parent Meta. To top it off, as I understand it, the lawyers filed the case in the wrong jurisdiction–a Federal court–though some of the defendants lived, like D’Ambrosio, in Illinois and should have been sued in that state.
Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt, who has been writing about frivolous lawsuits for years, declared their complaint to be “the single dumbest lawsuit on the planet.” Ken “Popehat” White, a lawyer and legal commenter, said it was “astoundingly sloppy and incompetent … This may be the most badly drafted complaint by a lawyer I have seen this millennium.” White guessed that the case would be thrown out “for jurisdictional defects” and, lo and behold, it promptly was.
Also, that same week, D’Ambrosio was found guilty of tax fraud in an unrelated case. When it rains!
Anyway, D’Ambrosio’s lawyers in the so-called defamation case did what Masnick characterizes as a “slipshod job” fixing the problems with the lawsuit, then quickly refiled. And apparently they ended up amending the complaint a second time, though I haven’t found any news articles about this. (I’m not sure how they got away with refiling in Federal court, but I’m not a lawyer.)
So that gets us to yesterday, when Federal judge Sunil R. Harjani issued his 35-page ruling, basically tearing the complaint to shreds and dismissing it with prejudice. Harjani declared that the statements made by the women didn’t amount to defamation, and that “despite having ample opportunity, D’Ambrosio has yet to identify any false statements, the central element of a defamation claim.”
He also blasted D’Ambrosio for “su[ing] anyone remotely associated with those posts for all possible, imaginable claims, including the woman who dated him and her parents, women commenting on posts, the operators of the Facebook group, and Facebook itself.” As a result of these things, and a number of others that are mostly too complicated for a non-lawyer like me to explain or sometimes even understand, the judge concluded:
While evident from his complaint that D’Ambrosio objects to the idea that women in Chicago, and nationally, have a private invite only forum in which they are able to discuss and potentially warn other women against men’s dating habits and that he personally detested being discussed in that group, the statements made about him do not amount to defamation, false light invasion of privacy, or doxing. The comments about D’Ambrosio in “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” were subjective opinions, which even if D’Ambrosio dislikes, cannot amount to defamation. As a result of these deficient claims and D’Ambrosio’s failure to articulate how Meta could be liable under the other counts, any amendment would be futile. Therefore, the Court dismisses D’Ambrosio’s Second Amended Complaint with prejudice.
Case closed, as they say. Really closed, in that it cannot be amended and refiled again.
The irony of it all is that D’Ambrosio filed his doomed lawsuit in the first place because he was angry that women in the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” group were, unfairly in his view, making him look like a jerk. In a private Facebook group.
Now his lawsuit is dead for good, and as a result of the extensive news coverage of his Quixotic legal quest, so it seems is his reputation. Now that women around the world (including lots of them in Chicago) know what a jerk he really is, I suspect that he’s going to have a much harder time finding anyone to date. To put it mildly. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
—
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth depends on support from you to survive. So please donate here if you can, or on Venmo!
And if you need help with writer’s block, or any other writing problem, I can help!
