1903: Justice Served: Unanimous Jury Awards Jason $62,847,494 in Malicious False Advertising & RICO Case

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I just want to say thanks to you because I would never been able to retire if I hadn't got hooked on to you 10 years ago. And I really owe this to you that I've met my goal, you know, to retire early and not work for the man and kind of be my own boss and, and I would never been able to do that had I not. I guess I was a little discouraged 10 years ago. But hooking onto your podcast and learning from what you were teaching has made this all possible.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1903. 1903. And today you're going to hear a story that might just blow your mind. Yes, it's an amazing story you're about to hear. This is not about real estate. It is about business. And it's about specifically my businesses, a couple of them. And I think you'll be fascinated by this. You heard me allude to it before and that is this big case that I was involved in over the last four years. You know, I hardly talked to anybody about this. I was going through a very, very difficult time. And this is something that could happen to you. It could happen to a family member, a friend. It could happen to anybody. I call this the crime of our time. It is a crime that is easy to commit and it is hard to hold someone accountable for. I was successful in doing it. And you're going to hear some of the gory details today. I think you're going to be fascinated by this. We will get back to regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday.

And I've got some good market updates for you that you've got to hear. But you've also got to hear this. Many people have asked me about it and I just wanted to share it with you. I really couldn't talk about it for legal reasons. Obviously, I couldn't talk about it. Also, there was no conclusion. It's this thing that just dragged on and dragged on and dragged on for four years. It was ruining my life. It was ruining my business. The competitor who did this, who tried to gain market share from us, basically tried to get me to commit suicide. And it almost worked, but thankfully it did not. And you're going to hear some amazing stuff. I've got one of our attorneys joining us here in a few minutes. But let me tell you how amazing this story is. Okay? So here goes. But oh, hey, let's not forget, join us for our recession Proof investing event starting on Friday. This Friday, that's a virtual event and it goes Friday and Saturday. So join us for that. And also save the date for the end of January in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona for Empowered Investor Live. We really want to have you at both of these events. For the virtual event, go to jasonhartman.com right at the top of the page. You can register there. We'd love to see you on Friday. This Friday. So let's dive into this. So this story, the crime of our time, started just over four years ago and it has happened to many other people. It could happen to you. And that's why I think you're going to learn a lot from this and it's going to be very interesting and educational because you never know when this could happen to you or could happen to anybody. In fact, I think a lot of people, well, a lot of people have been victims of this, but a lot of people will be victims of it. And let's go ahead and get into it. I'm going to share my screen for those of you watching the video of this so you can see a little more. This is the crime of our time. It started against me and two of my companies four years ago. And it could happen to you. That's why you need to listen. That's the most important part, other than just general interest, involves burner phones. It involves breadcrumbs. It involves fake Visa and MasterCard gift cards and American Express gift cards. These fake cards, these are used by terrorists. 60 Minutes did a whole thing on this a few years ago. It involves the dark web, the darknet, the strange places on the Internet that very few people go to. It involves suicidal thoughts and extreme depression. It involves something called complex ptsd, traumatic stress disorder. We're all familiar with that. But when it's an ongoing situation, not War, not terrible trauma. And you know, those things are obviously absolutely terrible and they've happened to a lot of people. But this is like this ongoing post Traumatic Stress disorder kind of issue and it's referred to as cptsd. Complex ptsd. It involves fake testimonials, or what they called the defendants called whipped testimonials. Right, fake testimonials. It involves being anonymous on the Internet. It involves hiding identities. It involves lying to police officers. Yes. It involves the FBI, it involves Bitcoin, it involves Interpol. I know. Does this sound like a spy movie? Well, it's almost like a spy movie and it involves MI5, the British equivalent of our CIA. Now actually, I should clarify, it doesn't actually involve MI5, at least not that I know of. But it involves the perpetrators calling the mission MI5. That's how they referred to it. Although you never know, it might. It spans the globe. I mean, vendors used in Switzerland, vendors used in offshore Caribbean islands that don't have to obey much law at all. It involves Silicon Valley. It involves just an amazing elaborate, it elaborate scheme. The amount of effort these people went to is really unbelievable. They hired a marketing agency to help them with all of this stuff. It's an absolutely amazing, crazy story. It is the crime of our time. And it could happen to you. And that's why I want you to hear this. Hopefully I can prevent this from happening to some other people. And if it ever does happen to you, you can learn from what happened to me and to my very difficult, very terrible, very depressing experience. So we're going to look at the jury verdict form here and we're going to invite one of our attorneys, the attorney that was with us all the way throughout the case on here, to fill you in on the details. So let's go to that segment.

I have got to have a very frank discussion with you today. I have been going through a tremendously difficult battle for four years and I've hardly talked to anyone about it. Even my own family didn't know much about this because it was such a complex, really an incredibly complex, multifaceted, multi dimensional, as I always say about real estate investments or income property investments. Nightmare, really an absolute nightmare I was going through. It affected every part of my life, it affected my relationships, it affected my physical fitness, my mental health. It was terrible. Some of you may know about this and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about it today because last week we finally got to the end and we got a resolution of this absolutely terrible thing. The thing I'm about to discuss may have happened to you. It may have happened to someone you know. In fact, it is such a pervasive issue now, at varying degrees, obviously, that I think it has happened to to some extent, or definitely will happen to almost everybody, because it is so easy to become a victim of the thing I'm about to describe and what happened to me. In fact, I call it the crime of our time. The crime of our time. And I did a presentation on this in Tampa, Florida, to an audience about four years ago. I just thought I had to try and clear my name. A competitor tried to absolutely ruin me. And to a large extent, they succeeded for a time. But thankfully, we took them to court. And last week, a jury of eight of our peers returned a verdict that was very favorable and very just. We had a federal court magistrate who engaged in a very fair trial process. We won some things. The other side won some things. The magistrate or judge was very thoughtful, very well considered, very logical. And the jury sat and heard testimony from many, many people and saw evidence from many, many sources for eight days. And they got a jury instruction that the judge read for over an hour last Wednesday. And then they went home and they thought about it all night long. And in the morning, they showed up to deliberate for about seven hours or so, and they returned a unanimous verdict. And I think this really cleared my name. And also, hopefully we will collect and it will compensate for the financial losses. How did this affect you, my listeners, my viewers? Well, maybe you didn't notice, maybe you did. But my reporting, my creativity, the things that I have been sharing with you for the last four years have not been up to my standards. And it was just because this depressed me so much and it was so difficult to go through this. It was such an emotional rollercoaster. I just had to ignore it after a while for my own mental health. It was really a terrible thing. I hope it never happens to you. And I think by hearing my story, you'll learn a lot about how to prevent this, possibly how to deal with it if it happens to you or a friend or a family member or a colleague. And I think it's very important. So the attorney that has been with me from the beginning on this is with me today, and I'd like to introduce him. He did a great job on the case. And that is Stephen Pollock. Stephen, welcome. How are you?

Hey, Jason, thanks for sharing your story. I'm happy to be here, and I was happy to be with you from the outset and get you justice yeah.

Well, thank you very much. And you are quite literally the only person who really knows what I went through. And my mother came and attended the trial, so she now knows. And at the end of the first day, or actually the first day at the lunch break, she says, jason, why didn't you tell me about this? I had no idea this was happening to you. It was just such an awful thing. I think you saw it for what it was at the beginning. Stephen, you helped me hire investigators. This was a global issue. It was just unbelievable. So maybe you can just tell the listeners and viewers what happened a little bit. We're going to show you and share the jury verdict form. This is a fascinating case. Someone has got to make a movie about it, what happened. Maybe you can describe it better than I.

Sure. I could tell you from. Definitely from the legal standpoint, I could. I'm happy to tell the story. I think if any particulars about how you're feeling was definitely, I'll defer to you. But of course, as a lawyer, I'm going to give the disclaimer. Yeah. Everything I say here is just my opinion based on my experiences and what happened in the case. But starting from the outset, I'll tell you from my perspective. You know, you were a client that came to me under dire circumstances. You needed immediate relief. And usually, I don't get that. Usually cases come in, they're either considering a lawsuit or, you know, they have a lawsuit filed against them. They have 30 days to sort of figure out what's going on. You can get an extension from there. Your situation was very different. You needed immediate help. You had learned about this website that was out there that had all sorts of falsities and salacious content about you, about your businesses, about your history.

And there was an email that was being sent out to your clients and colleagues that actually had your name in it. There was impersonation. This. Whoever was emailing said that they were emailing from Jason Hartman, and they were emailing out links to this website, this hit website that they put out about you. And so you first learned about this in July of 2018, and you found me and said, Mr. Pollock, you got to help me resolve this. I don't know how many emails are going out to my clients and colleagues. I don't know how vast this is. I don't know who's doing it. Please help me stop it. And that's actually quite a difficult thing to do because the court system is a little antiquated, and they're not really the best forum to go to for cyber attacks, cyberbullying or, or cyber intrusions. So we had to move really fast and that's what we did. We started hiring cyber investigators almost immediately. We reached out to domestic cyber investigators and we actually had to reach out to a firm that I had knowledge of, based in Tel Aviv, Israel because they have some of the best minds in the cyber world and luckily they were able to give us some information. But even then, the sophisticated misconduct that was occurring here made it very difficult. And I'll sort of let you usher in the story, but, but that's the initial part of the story. That's how we, how I first learned about it. That's how this case first began.

Yeah, it was awful. I mean, they were spreading just lies and misleading and, you know, statements that had sometimes a grain of truth in them. But the spin doctoring just created such a completely false impression. And in so many ways it was on a personal level, a business level. Just unbelievable how sophisticated this was. It was really. Well, we actually got a verdict in our favor. The jury felt, and I of course felt, and you felt that it was a conspiracy and it was a conspiracy. And we just got such an incredible verdict. And we're going to get to that and we're going to share it with you because we could talk about this. This could be a many hour long show.

So it was an eight day trial. So yeah, hey, it was an eight day trial with a one day of deliberation too. So it could be nine days easily to talk about it. What's interesting is in the courtroom, a lot of people get worked up about what happens to them in life. I know I do. You know, when someone rips me off, takes advantage of me, you know, I want to run to the attorney and say, hey, fix this. You know, and it's just in this sterile environment of a courtroom and the legal system, you know, things just play out differently. The rules of evidence, they don't allow you to present a lot of things that you think, gosh, this is like the smoking gun. And I, I can't even show this. The jury's never going to see this. The court is never going to see this. Right. Sometimes, you know, that works out that way. But it's the way the system is and the system is that way for a reason. It's been built upon, you know, hundreds of years of scholarship and thinking and it's really an incredible system, but also a very slow and very expensive too, for sure. But let me show some visuals here for those who are watching on video. And maybe we can kind of go through these things one by one, Stephen, and you can kind of explain them. But as I mentioned before in this presentation I did four years ago in Florida, I call it the crime of our time because it's such an easy crime to commit and it can do so much damage and most people don't have the resources to pursue it like I did. I had the money to spend, I have the knowledge, I had the will, you know, just kept with it. So let's kind of go through these things if we can. So just the judge on Wednesday evening reading the jury instructions. It took him over an hour just to read them to the jury and explain them. But here was the first, I guess, cause of action. Right? And the first thing the jury had to rule on. Can you talk to us about this one?

Sure. So, you know, just looking at this, I can imagine some of your listeners will view this as a foreign language, and it is a foreign language. So I'll try to give as much background as I can. But what happened with the misconduct that defendants engaged in is that they took your name, which was trademarked as, which was a very smart move because your name is not just your name, it's a brand. Jason Hartman is a brand. Clients refer to you as the Jason Hartman Network, whether they're working with one of your investment counselors or otherwise. It's the Jason Hartman Network. And that was built up over a period of decades. And so luckily, you have a trademark on Jason hartman and jason hartman.com. and so what defendants did was they created domain names, which is the URL. It's just what you type into the URL bar that fully incorporated your trademark. So, for example, because that would get.

Them a lot more search engine traffic and a lot more viewers, they sent out these falsify emails. They could get a lot of traffic. They used my name and my trademark, right?

Yeah, exactly. And the court found that they were actually diverting traffic to themselves and that was the goal of using your name. This competitor wanted to divert people looking for Jason Hartman.com to their website, which was called Jason Hartman properties.com very similar to your most popular webpage, Jason Hartman.com properties. They also had domain names like Jason Hartman investments.com, jason Hartman realestate investments.com, jason Hartman media.com and so they would fully incorporate your marks and add these industry related terms attached to them in order to create maximum confusion and to run searches for Jason Hartman up high on Google and Bing and other search engines. So when somebody does that, they engage in counterfeiting as well as cyber squatting. There are laws that prohibit somebody from counterfeiting another's mark. And so they engaged in the counterfeiting. And the court already found that before trial. We did a really good job on summary judgment, and we got some of these issues decided by the court because the evidence was indisputable and defendants didn't dispute that they used these domain names and the reasoning for that. So all that was left for the jury was to decide was defendants counterfeiting, which was already decided that they counterfeited. Was it willful? And in this context, willful means, were they trying to steal your audience? Were they trying to misappropriate your goodwill? And that was something that was. It was tough to really show that because you need smoking gun evidence to show, hey, that's the reason they were using your marks. And fortunately, we were able to show that, and the jury agreed with us that defendants were engaging in willful counterfeiting. The entire purpose of them using your marks and using your name and their domain names was to steal your audience to capture eyeballs that would normally go to you. They wanted it on what they wanted to show the audience. So you see here the last sentence on question number one, which, if any, of defendants counterfeiting was willful? That's really the question. And that's really important, because if it's not willful, you can see this first range up above 1,000 to 200,000 per mark. That's the maximum damages that you can award if the conduct was not willful. For example, if somebody had not known you had not known about your brand and just accidentally came up with a domain name, you know, Jason hartmanproperties.com that's one thing that's. That might not be willful. But if they know about your brand and they know about your website and they're intending to divert your customers and clients, which is exactly what happened here, that's willful conduct. And it ups the maximum amount of statutory damages to $2 million per mark.

Okay, so, Stephen, let me just interrupt you for a second here. So the jury found that it was willful. If it wasn't, it would have been $1,000 to $200,000 per mark. And there's two trademarks here in question. But because they found it was first willful, and then they awarded also the maximum because it was so egregious what these people did to me. I mean, it was just awful, they awarded instead of 1,000 per mark. $2 million per mark. And so that is a $4 million verdict in our favor, Right?

Precisely. And you talked before about creating new law. Well, this is one of the areas. We created new law because we had asked the court, I believe it was for a one and a half million dollar award or maybe one million dollars in statutory damages per mark. And the court said, there's no precedent for that. That's a really high amount, and there's just no basis at this point for an award that large. And what we did was we showed and we created precedent where that is an appropriate amount. That is the top line of what could be awarded by law. And the reasoning from the jury, I believe, was because this was such egregious misconduct.

Oh, it was so egregious. Yeah.

And that's confirmed by the award of punitive damages, which I imagine we'll get to.

We'll get to that.

Yeah, yeah. But the point is, that is a top line. That was the maximum amount allowed by law the jury awarded against all defendants.

That's. That's great. Okay, so now let's look at federal cyber squatting. You know, we got a lot to cover here, so let's speed up a little bit. You know, I know we gotta give some background, but talk to us about this one. This was count five, and it was the second thing the jury had to decide, which is called federal cyber squatting. What did they do and what did we get here?

Sure. So this just means using somebody else's domain name, pirating their domain name, and you don't have to have an actual trademark on the term to be guilty of cyber squatting. So you can just create a domain name that's similar to someone else's, and if you have a bad faith intent to profit from that similar domain name, you're guilty of cyber squatting.

Got it. Okay. And so here I think there were somewhere between four to nine domain names that they created. And we got $100,000 each, right?

Yeah. So they did buy nine domain names, six of which we believe were pirated.

Okay, let's go to the next one. Now, this is federal unfair competition, false representation and false designation of origin, and unfair competition under Florida common law. Okay. And this again, Stephen, because you did such a great job a long time ago, before we even got to court. It says the court has ruled as a matter of law that defendants are liable for engaging in unfair competition against plaintiffs Hartman Media Platinum Properties and Hartman, meaning me individually. So tell us about this one and what the jury ordered Us here.

Sure. So, as you mentioned, this was decided by the court based on the undisputed evidence. The defendants were engaging in a form of competition with you. Again, defendants were in the real estate investing industry, and they were engaging a competition that is unlawful, unfair, and is prohibited by law. And so the jury only had to decide how much were you damaged, how much were plaintiffs, meaning you and your companies, how much were they damaged? And so that the court, the jury, came back with an actual damages award, but not only that, they found that defendants actually profited off their misconduct in the amount of one and a half million dollars.

Okay, so we got a $3 million award and then a $1.5 million disgorgement of profits. Now, what's interesting here to note, too, and I know that this came up in the testimony when our expert. And by the way, expert witnesses are so expensive, I cannot believe what these guys charge. But. But when you see the ultimate result here, you know, you're going to think it's a drop in the bucket. But what's interesting here is that we didn't even want to spend this. Should have gone to trial two years earlier, Covid. And all the delays, and they're stalling. They didn't want to go to trial. They got various extensions and postponements, but we didn't even pay the expert to do the report all the way through the time we went to trial because the delays. So this might have been a higher award had we done that, Right?

Precisely.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So moving on. So now we get to federal false advertising. Okay. And it says, you know, which, if any, defendants have. Plaintiffs proven by a preponderance of evidence are liable for federal false advertising. Answer yes or no for each defendant individually. And then if you find the defendants are liable for federal false advertising, what amount of money do you find should be awarded to plaintiffs as a result? Talk to us about this one.

Sure. So first, I'll notice, you know, because I'm looking at it here. This is the first time we see the full list of defendants, or at least it looks that way. And I just want to point out that this was a cadre of defendants. This wasn't a single actor. This was a group of actors that were all working at the behest of a competitor. The competitor is pip, the PIP Group, llc. And you had the owner, his wife, who was a 49% owner of the company, a digital marketing contractor and their marketing lead, their coordinator of marketing and client relations. They had all these people working together in order to destroy You. And so we asked for liability against all defendants, and the jury agreed with us. As far as false advertising, what is this? It's really in the name of. It's just a form of advertising. And it doesn't have to be like, hey, here's a sale of some good. It can be any form of advertising that helps a business. And there just has to be some falsity in there that is material to the audience, meaning it can affect a purchaser's decision making. So was there a falsity in the advertising that affected a purchaser's decision? The jury found yes.

And they awarded us $1.5 million for this false advertising, Right?

Correct.

Okay. Okay, let's move on to the next one. Now, this one is really interesting, and you alluded to this a moment ago when you talked about how this was an organized thing. I mean, people listening. You know, it's one thing to have a competitor, to have someone you want to gain market share from, but it's quite another thing to hire a team of people and a marketing agency to destroy their business. Right. And that's what they did. Well, that's what the jury found. You know, I guess I can't. I don't have to say allegedly anymore. Right. Because we have a verdict. So. So tell us about this one.

Sure. So this was really a great statute. It's the meat and potatoes of the case, ultimately, because it allowed us to get treble damages and mandatory attorneys fees. And what this is is the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations act, known commonly as rico. And there's also RICO conspiracy, which just means you participated and agreed to the overall objective of the RICO scheme. But this was originally passed in 1970 to combat organized crime. It was a criminal statute first. Then a civil provision was added to it to allow people to be compensated for essentially criminal activity that was engaged in. And you have to show multiple acts of criminal activity over a short period of time within 10 years, all related to the same purpose.

So those are called the predicates. Right, These RICO predicates. And this is why RICO is. You know, it's tough and we won on it. But there were multiple criminal acts leading up to this whole conspiracy where these people tried to just destroy me and my business. Tell us about those, if you would, or. I don't know how much you want to say. You're the lawyer, so I'll let you.

Yeah, well, I'll just point out that, yeah, we did have to prove criminal activity under the civil burden. So usually when you're when you're charged with a crime, you have to prove the crime by. By a reasonable doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's if you want to lock somebody up here. We're just trying to get compensation for the damage done to you and your businesses. So we only had to prove criminal activity by a preponderance of the evidence. And the jury ended up agreeing with us that there were multiple acts of criminal activity all towards the same purpose. And so we were able to get RICO liability. And I should mention that really, what it is, it's not organized crime today. What it is, is aimed to hold people accountable when they don't want to get their hands dirty. When you have a mastermind who says you do X, you do Y, you do Z, and everybody's sort of acting independently with the master, with the puppet master on top. And that's exactly what happened here. And some of the defenses from the defendants were, well, look, you know, I didn't know this stuff was false. I didn't know what the others were doing. I was just minding my business. Yeah, I sent a couple of these emails.

I was just doing what my boss told me to do.

I was just.

I didn't even read the emails. I just copied and pasted the content.

Yeah, right, precisely. And yeah, and then there's, you know, the digital marketing side of, look, I was just doing my job. They hired me to do this. But really, the jury found that that was not credible. Right. The jury didn't believe that storyline. They all had to participate in the overall objective. They all had to participate in the scheme and commit criminal acts themselves. And so there's liability against all of the defendants on this count, too.

Okay, so this is. We were awarded $3 million on this one, but with Rico, it has some special provisions. Right. Do you want to tell us about that?

Absolutely. I alluded to this before that, that the damages are trebled, meaning you get three times whatever actual damages the jury found. So you're going to get $9 million on this count alone. You also get mandatory attorneys fees, meaning every penny you spent to prove your case, you get compensated for.

Yeah. So that, that was a big win to get rico. Good work on that. Now, also, that's the federal RICO statute, but Florida, the state of Florida has its own RICO statute as well. And go over this one quickly, but was there a big difference in these two statutes or so?

Really, the only big difference. Well, there's two big differences. One, you need more of a connection to the state of Florida. You have to show a lot of different activity that actually touched the state of Florida.

Yeah. And by the way, none of the defendants live in Florida, but I live in Florida. And many of the people. And we had two of them testify that also live in Florida, two clients and associates of mine came in and testified. And you know, they were reaching out to Florida residents and Florida businesses. Right?

Yeah. And they were actually using Florida based services. They were using that to send emails to your clients and colleagues. So certainly that touched Florida as well. Another aspect of Florida RICO that's different is you have more predicate acts, more crimes that fall under the statute.

Okay. By the way, one of the things we had to do is mountains of discovery and investigative work. And I mean, folks dealing with this was easily a two hour a day for the last four years commitment of my time. I mean, maybe more certainly in mental energy, it was more than that. But just the stuff I had to do, the people I had to hire, as I said to you before, Stephen, it was like starting another company. I mean, we had to hire so many people and so many resources and so many investigators and send out so many subpoenas. I mean, do you remember how many subpoenas did we have to do in this case?

Oh, I remember at one point we had sent out 14 subpoenas within. Within like two days. We needed to get information. And you know, we had difficulty getting information from defendants at first. We had to file motions, meaning requests to the court asking for sanctions because.

And we got, we got sanctions and spoliation sanctions and all kinds of stuff. Right?

Yeah. The parties agreed to avoid an evidentiary hearing. They agreed just to say, look, yeah, we didn't preserve evidence, we were required to preserve. And we came up with an agreement that we were able to instruct the jury on. But there was a lot of data and documents missing. A lot was produced, but a lot was missing. And so we had to get information from third parties. And honestly, some of the best evidence we got was from third parties. People that, that aren't defendants used their communications.

Yeah. And. And by the way, you know, when you're in a case or you're doing detective work, I mean, you have to be really good at seeing what didn't they produce. You know, I always talk about, you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. You hear me say that all the time. Right. There's a profound impact of things unseen. I talk about that constantly. I've been saying that for easily 12 years or more. And we knew that they were hiding Things because we could tell by the conversations that they wouldn't sync up. And it was just an incredible amount of effort to understand all of that. So, yeah, it's just quite a thing. So now we get to Florida statutory false advertising, and we got a four and a half million dollar award on this one. This basically says which if any defendants have plaintiffs proven by a preponderance of evidence are liable for Florida statutory false advertising, they found all of them liable and awarded $4.5 million. Do you want to talk about this one?

No. I mean, it's really covered by the things we spoke about already. It's just advertising in a false manner or including material falsities in advertisements.

Okay, so now we get to count eight, which is Florida civil conspiracy. How does this differ from Rico? And tell us about this. This was another $3 million in the award, folks. We're going to add this all up for you at the end, and you're going to be amazed at the number. So. But tell us about this one.

Yeah, so it's actually count 13. It's eighth on the list. But I got to tell you, we, we took a very comprehensive approach and brought all legal counts that we possibly could. And that just means they violated all defendants, violated all sorts of different laws. They violated civil and criminal laws. And so we, we had to package and unpackage this and make sure we were bringing the right counts to get accountability, full accountability. And so civil conspiracy just means that you agree with someone else to commit something unlawful and you actually take a step towards doing that unlawful activity. It's, it's sort of built into rico. If, if you found rico, you have to find civil conspiracy. I, I don't envision a circumstances where you have one without the other, although you could be engaging in a civil conspiracy without engaging in rico. So, you know, that hopefully that's not too confusing, but essentially that just means people are working together towards an unlawful end. And the jury found that all defendants were conspiring together to commit unlawful acts.

Yeah. So that was another $3 million. Keep the tally, folks. Okay, so now we get to common law. And this one was particularly impactful on my personal life. Common law invasion of privacy and Florida statutory invasion of privacy, commercial misappropriation of likeness. So the question for the jury, question number 21 was which, if any, defendants have plaintiffs proven by preponderance of evidence are liable for the unauthorized publication or use of Hartman's name or likeness. And then they awarded $3 million on this one against all six defendants. Talk about this one a little bit.

So we spoke about the domain names, using your name and your brand and those domain names. We also talked about email addresses where they were using your name. Defendants didn't stop there. They actually went one step further by using your name in the subject lines of their emails. It would say, important Hartman update or great information by Mr. Hartman or something along those lines. And the reason why they were using your name was to misappropriate your audience. We talked about this before with willfulness. And so this cause of action doesn't allow someone else to get eyeballs based on someone else's popularity. Right. So defendants used your popularity against you, and they used people recognizing your name against you. And so that is an invasion of privacy and a commercial misappropriation.

And I don't know if you remember this. I don't know if this one actually was presented as evidence at the trial, but they did have my picture on their website at one time. And I think they got smart and took that down because that was more inflammatory even. And I think they had a picture of me with a dunce cap.

And then. And then they had just. Just a comic picture of a guy with a dunce cap, and it wasn't me. Later, they changed that out. But this is misappropriating someone's likeness and like you said, gaining popularity off their name. Yeah.

And I will point out it wasn't so much what was in the body of the. Of the email. You can talk about someone else and use their name when talking about them, but it's when you try to use someone else's popularity against them or for your own purposes. So because they were using your name to gain attraction, to get that interest, that's why they were liable under this count.

Okay, so now this is the jury verdict form for punitive damages. So, Stephen, what are punitive damages? We've all heard about them, but explain what they are.

So they are what the name suggests. They're punishment. Punishment Damages, in other words. And it's not easy to get punitive damages. The jury would have to find that this was willful and wanton misconduct, meaning that they did it with animus and with anger, with the intent to harm. And the amount that can be awarded, there's certain guidelines as to how much you can award. I'm sure people have heard about $100 million punitive damages, awards that go up on appeal and they're reduced. So the jury here was very.

Good with fashioning a remedy in the amounts here. They didn't go Overboard. And the jury found that these defendants committed willful and wanton misconduct. They needed those punitive damages to deter future conduct. You know, we. We had this theme of civilized society. Do we want to live in a society where competitors are competing in this way? You say something I don't like, or I want your market share, I can just go misappropriate your name, create websites about you, send emails to all your clients. That's not the way we want to operate in society.

Yeah. Fortunately, we have a system that hopefully enforces civility. But here, what they did, and I think the jury was very thoughtful about this, I think you alluded to that a moment ago, is that they apportioned the amount of punitive damages differently to different defendants. Now, not all of the defendants give a financial statement or a tax return, so the jury didn't for sure know, but I think they formed an opinion about it. Right. And you can see that the highest punitive damages were against a company and then the mastermind, and a lesser amount against an employee of the company. So I think the jury was very thoughtful about that. Any comment on that?

No, that's exactly right. I think they knew who was really the mastermind behind the misconduct. And of course, the contributors, the people who also participated but didn't have the same degree of animus, they awarded less punitive damages for.

Yeah. So they did the right thing on that. Now, this is punitive damages just for one issue, which is unfair competition under Florida common law. Okay, so we're going to get to another punitive damages issue. Right. And this is Florida civil conspiracy, punitive damages. Which, if any, defendants do you find plaintiffs proved by clear and convincing evidence. A higher standard we had to. To come by here, were guilty of Florida civil conspiracy. And the jury found that all six of them were guilty of civil conspiracy. And then the question was what amount of money should be assessed against the liable defendants for punitive damages on this claim? And do you want to elaborate on that?

Yeah, sure. I just want to point out that these weren't required. The jury could have said zeros across, could have said $100, could have set any amount. When we had shown the jury the verdict form, we actually left these spaces blank because it's completely up to them. The jury did feel that the misconduct at issue warranted this degree of punitive damages. So, as you see, there's the most against the mastermind, the second most against the mastermind's company, and through which all this misconduct was occurring. And then the helpers were held Culpable to a lower degree. But still, it does show you that the jury found this misconduct to be absolutely unacceptable in today's society.

Yeah. Fortunately, they did well. Okay, so now we have. I think this is the last one on the punitive damages. Common law invasion of privacy and Florida statutory invasion of privacy, commercial misappropriation of likeness. So, again, this is which, if any, defendants, do you find that Plaintiff Hartman proved by clear and convincing evidence, a higher standard. Again, were guilty of intentional misconduct or gross negligence in engaging in the unauthorized publication or use of Plaintiff Hartman's name or likeness. And the jury found that all six defendants were liable. Or I guess this is guilty. Actually, this is slightly different way of putting the question. Right. Then they awarded the same sort of style of punitive damages in the way you explained before. And I think they were very thoughtful about that.

Yeah, precisely. Agreed. We had a really good jury pool. You know, the jury pool is put together based on joint efforts of defendants and plaintiffs. And we each have a number of peremptory strikes, meaning we can strike certain jurors.

Both sides kicked out people. Right?

Both sides kicked out people. Exactly. And our jury pool paid very careful attention to the evidence. You could tell they were engaged the whole time. Sometimes, you know, jurors are playing on their phones or doing something else. Our jurors were engaged the entire time. They were really considering the evidence. And each one had a monitor, a screen, so that they were able to see the exhibits right in front of them. And you would see all of them turn to these exhibits and pay close attention to the case. So we had a very thoughtful jury. And one other point about punitive damages, as you mentioned, you have to prove it by clear and convincing evidence, which is a higher burden of proof.

Right.

There has to be a reasonable certainty. And we did prove that.

Yeah. And it was great. You know, I think the jury was just riveted to this case because, I don't know, everybody probably thinks their case is interesting, but this one was interesting. I mean, it was tragic. You know, one of the things that I had said is that if I had to just stop reading this stuff and engaging with it and let you engage with it, some of this stuff I really didn't remember or maybe I hadn't even seen until we got to trial, because I just had to zone out, I would have taken my own life had I looked at all this stuff. I mean, it was just so awful and evil what these people did to me. But I'm glad that justice was served. And initially, I had added Wrong. On this award, it adds up to basically $50 million. And then interest is assessed, I guess, from the time or the last part of the wrongdoing from October of 2018. And that interest alone adds, like another $11 million to the award, bringing it up to $61 million. But the other side may fight about some of this.

The jury's still out on this one because the jury's been dismissed. But the parties need to work out which damages are actually going to be sticking because some of it's duplicative. So we are going to take out some of the damages and we're going to agree to a final amount that's going to be actually entered as a judgment. You're going to have a judgment against all defendants.

Well, folks, if you're thinking Jason is going to retire and be laying on a beach in the Bahamas, no way. I have, you know, I could have easily retired of, you know, many, many years ago, 15, 17 years ago, when I sold my last company. And I've been working like crazy ever since because I love what I do, and I just want to be able to do it without interference, be able to book the guests I want on my podcast without fear that they're going to be trolled by a competitor, told all sorts of lies about me, and all kinds of just crazy stuff. That this case was just unbelievable. But what else would you like people to know about this, Stephen?

I would just say, you know, you alluded to this, that this was a really riveting story. And I think during the trial, it came up that this was sort of like a spy movie. And it was referred to what they were doing as the MI5 project, alluding to the British Intelligence Agency. This really was multifaceted, multi channel, in order to destroy you. So I think the fact that you're sitting here today and can say, justice has been served, that's the reason why I got into the law. That's the reason why we do this, to get justice for clients and to stop wrongdoers.

Yeah, and you did a great job at this one, for sure. And that's a high calling, a noble calling, because there are a lot of wrongdoers out there and they need to be stopped. And this one, it took four years, basically, but we saw it through and saw it through to the end. And maybe we should cue the Elton John song now. I'm still standing.

I was actually thinking the little audience clapping that you have, you have the button there.

We've got that one. Yeah.

A huge victory and a huge justice has been served.

Yeah, well. And thank you for all of your help and if anyone has this happen to them or wants to know more about it, I'm happy to talk about it more. But it was just a terrible thing to go through. But I'm glad justice was served. I haven't collected a penny yet, but hopefully we'll start collecting some money soon. And Steven, thank you again for all of your help and sticking by me in all this. It was a tremendous undertaking, the hardest thing I've ever gone through in my life, no question. And just glad it's over and it came to a very good conclusion. So thank you again.

Yep, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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