The Onion, a satirical publication known for poking fun at everything from popular culture to global politics, is getting into serious trouble. On Monday, that filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in support of an Ohio man facing criminal charges over a Facebook page parodying his local police department.
Anthony Novak, an amateur comedian from Parma, a suburb of Cleveland, was arrested and briefly jailed after creating a fake social media page in 2016 styled after the Parma Police Department’s Facebook page. His lawyers argue that it was an obvious parody and he was acquitted at trial.
Novak later filed a civil suit alleging that his constitutional rights were violated, though it was dismissed after a federal appeals court granted police officers qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects government officials from being sued for allegedly violating civil rights. “There is no recognized right to be free from retaliatory arrest that is supported by probable cause,” the appeals judges ruled.
Now, Novak is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case.
True to form, the supporting brief filed Monday by Onion lawyers takes a satirical approach in their bid to get the nation’s highest court to consider Novak’s petition. It begins with an eerily false claim that the Onion is “the world’s leading news publication,” with a “daily readership of 4.3 billion” that has “become the most powerful and influential organization in the history of humanity”.
The Onion created the lovable “Diamond Joe” Biden. Then he destroyed it.
Sarcasm and hyperbole notwithstanding, legal writing is no joke. The purpose of the publication is to get the Supreme Court to examine qualified immunity and free speech rights. (Amicus briefs are documents submitted by parties not directly involved in a case to provide the court with additional information.)
“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to gut a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly powerful in the realm of political debate and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s discourse. writers’ salaries,” the document says.
It also highlights what the Onion suggests are shortcomings in the legal system when it comes to protecting those who use comedy to question people in positions of authority.
“The Onion regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and national presidential administrations,” the brief said. “So the professional parodists at The Onion were not thrilled to be faced with a legal ruling that does not hold government actors accountable for imprisoning and prosecuting an aspiring comedian simply for making fun of him.”
According to Novak’s lawyers, police obtained an arrest warrant for a fake Facebook page mocking the department. The page in question was only up for about 12 hours before Novak took it down after law enforcement threatened a criminal investigation. They searched his apartment, confiscated his electronics and charged him with a felony under an Ohio law that criminalizes using a computer to “disrupt” police operations.
Novak’s petition asks the Supreme Court to decide whether officers can claim qualified immunity when they arrest someone based solely on speech. It also asks the judges to end the doctrine entirely.
An attorney representing Parma, Richard Rezie, said in an email Tuesday that Novak’s lawsuit was “baseless” and that the courts that dismissed it “did not base their opinions on parody, free speech or the need for a disclaimer.”
Novak “went beyond mimicry” when he copied a warning posted by the City of Parma on his page onto the fake page, claiming his was the “official” version, Rezie said. “Falsely copying an official notice along with a claim to be the real Facebook page is not a parody.”
The Onion did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its legal brief. Andrew Wimer, a spokesman for the Institute for Justice, the civil rights law nonprofit that represents Novak, described the brief as “both humorous and very serious.”
“If police can use their authority to arrest their critics without consequence, everyone’s rights are at risk,” the institute said in a statement.