John Oliver takes on muzzling lawsuits – and the man who sued his show

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ripped into frivolous lawsuits meant to silence dissent, an issue with which he has personal experience: two years ago, Last Week Tonight was sued by Bob Murray, the then CEO of Murray Energy, the largest private coal company in America, after the show did a segment highly critical of the coal executive.

Since then, “because the case has been in litigation, we haven’t been able to discuss it”, Oliver explained. But Murray recently dropped the lawsuit, “so we can finally tell you exactly what happened – which is honestly worth doing, not only because it’s a crazy story, but it actually points to a much bigger problem here”.

But first, Oliver offered some background on the Murray lawsuit: Murray objected to Oliver’s characterization of him as “someone who looks like a geriatric Dr Evil” and a segment in which a staff member dressed up as a squirrel and delivered the message “Eat shit, Bob!” on a large check (in reference to a former employee’s diss of the CEO written on a $3.22 bonus check).

Murray’s lawsuit sought damages, because he claimed that “nothing has ever stressed him more than this vicious and untruthful attack”. It’s “an odd thing to say”, Oliver commented, “given that, as I just mentioned, he oversaw a company whose mine collapse in Utah resulted in the deaths of nine people.

“Obviously, the lawsuit was a bullshit attempt to silence us,” Oliver continued, “perhaps best exemplified by a motion that Murray filed to try to get a gag order to prevent us from rebroadcasting the story or even having it up online.” (The piece is still online, “big time”, at www.stillontheinternetbigtime.com.)

The lawsuit was, unsurprisingly, dismissed by a West Virginia court last February, but Murray appealed the case to the West Virginia supreme court. The case languished there for over a year before Murray dropped it (Murray Energy is also, perhaps relatedly, now reorganizing for bankruptcy).

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Which raises the question: “What was the point of him putting us through all of this in the first place?” Oliver asked. “I would argue that winning the case was never really his goal.” And that intent connects to Oliver’s larger issue of the day: Slapp (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) lawsuits. Slapp suits are, Oliver explained, “frivolous suits with no legal merit specifically designed to stifle public debate or dissent.

“The whole point is to put the defendant through a difficult, painful experience and even if cases fail in lower court, as they often do, the plaintiffs can find ways to extend them through intensive discovery requests, depositions and appeals that drain the defendants’ time and resources.

“Pretty much everyone from judges to legal scholars agree that Slapp suits are a scourge,” Oliver continued, which is why 30 states have some sort of anti-Slapp legislation, usually requiring plaintiffs to sufficiently justify their claims early in the process. But that means 20 states do not have such laws – including West Virginia, where Murray filed his suit against Oliver despite neither of them living in the state. Murray also, according to the Washington Post, sued nine journalists between 2001 and 2015 for critical coverage, as well as environmental protesters at the company’s headquarters in Ohio. The local newspaper that covered the small protest, the Chagrin Valley Times, and the protest’s organizers beat Murray’s suit but were tied up in litigation for years; the paper paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and removed its Murray-related articles from its website. The Ohio judge in the 2014 case explicitly wrote in his decision that the ruling demonstrated the need for Ohio to adopt anti-Slapp legislation.

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This was the point, Oliver said: “Lawsuits are like famous Instagram pugs – they don’t have to work to be considered very, very successful.

“By cultivating a reputation for being aggressively litigious, Murray may have actually got what he wanted and successfully applied a chokehold to how he is covered.” Oliver pointed to two lawsuits against Murray with serious and corroborated accounts of workplace harassment and misconduct that have been suspiciously underreported in the press.

“I would argue that one reason [for the silence] might be that organizations are justifiably wary of getting sued by Murray,” Oliver said, “because even if they are baseless, his lawsuits can do major damage.” The suit against Last Week Tonight cost them over $200,000 in legal fees, Oliver said, “and even though our insurance covered part of it, and we were lucky that HBO stood by us. This lawsuit was infuriating, took up a lot of time and resources, and resulted in a tripling of our libel insurance premiums despite the fact that, to reiterate: we fucking won this case!”

The whole episode points to how “we badly need effective anti-Slapp laws nationwide to deter powerful people like Bob Murray from using the courts to shut down people’s legitimate dissent”, Oliver said.

Murray will probably sue them again for the new segment, Oliver concluded, despite the fact that every line was vigorously vetted by lawyers and that “loose, figurative language that cannot reasonably be understood to convey facts” – AKA jokes – have long been considered protected speech by the supreme court.

And in the end, Oliver said, “it would be really tempting to say a bunch of loose, figurative things about Bob Murray right now not just on our behalf, but on behalf of every small newspaper and individual that he has sued and on behalf of every employee who’s felt ill-treated by his company and who may have wanted to tell him to, say, eat shit, but couldn’t”.

The last two years have been “too exhausting” to say more about Bob Murray, Oliver said – but he could sing, and he launched into a five-minute, Times Square-set musical number of jokes aptly titled Eat Shit, Bob.