So, last week when I was working away, I had a look at the small ads in the satirical UK news magazine Private Eye because they're usually good for a laugh, and I was intrigued by an advert with a GoFundMe URL which claimed that they needed money urgently to save their home from being repossessed by an evil cabal of skeptics and humanists.
(If I can find the photo I took of it, I'll stick it up here.)
So, I whipped out my phone and went to the URL and I found this:
www.gofundme.com/ukinjustice
I then followed the rabbit hole down further and further and further. What happened was basically this. Please note this is just a synopsis; the full story can be found in the blog posts from those involved and the judgement handed down by His Honour Judge Seys Llewellyn QC in the Swansea District Registry of the High Court in 2015.
Back in 2012, they had a dispute with a Steiner school in New Zealand. They allege that the school was covering up the bullying of their children and expelled them for being bullied, however, the school has it that they were making a song and dance and turning up at the school and chimping out at staff.
To be fair I think there's probably truth on both sides; the Steiner philosophy doesn't believe bullying is a thing and that it's actually karma in action (are Steiner schools threadworthy maybe?).
Anyhow, they wrote lengthy blogposts on the topic, and in so doing ran into two worthies named Andy Lewis, Melanie Byng, and Richard Byng. These are all medical people but they are also hobbyist skeptics and humanists and one of them, Andy Lewis, on his blog, did a post critical of Steiner education. Angel Garden subsequently found the post and commented on it. The original post and her comment has been lost in the aether but I get the impression it was full of NOTICE ME SEMPAI and stuff about how she was a victim and they should give her asspats. Due to containing lots of links, it was held up in the mod queue for eight hours.
EIGHT WHOLE HOURS.
During this eight hour period during which her comment was not visible (most likely because Andy was at work, in bed, out, or doing things off the internets because he has an actual job and an actual life), she chimped out across social media accusing Andy Lewis of censoring her, erasing her experiences, and generally not making her bad experiences with Steiner education the focus of his campaign. His response was to explain as much and BTFO her from his blog.
Bad move.
There then followed a three-year internet slapfight during which they, on their blog, Amazon News Media, uploaded constant salty cryposts about how Lewis and Byng, in warning other people they knew to not let Garden & Paris shit up their blogs with NOTICE ME SEMPAI and demands for asspats, were, in fact, defaming them and engaging in a campaign of "covert harassment" against them.
(I should also mention here that they tried to get Melanie Byng's husband Richard fired from his job by ringing his employer and saying that his failure to keep his wife in line over what she posted on the internets was conduct unbecoming. Fhat the wuck.)
Links to relevant blog posts setting out exactly what went on here:
http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2015/07/libel-case-paris-garden.html
http://forum.thinkhumanism.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=5956
http://www.thinkhumanism.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6390
http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2012/11/angel-garden-and-steve-paris.html
And a Facebook comment thread from the time:
A lolsuit was inevitable. Now lolsuit threats might be relatively common for lolcows, but it takes a pretty exceptional type of cow to actually issue one (hi there Vordrak!), and an even more exceptional one to actually take it all the way to a contested trial. The lolsuit papers were helpfully all collated by Paris & Garden on the below link in PDF format (although the pleadings and evidence in Byng and Lewis's defence are conspicuously missing... hmmm!)
http://stopdefamation.net/
http://archive.md/C6Nc1
Here also is a PDF version of the judgement without Steve Paris's autismal commentary shitting it up:
https://inforrm.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/paris-garden-v-lewis-byng-approved-jgmt-2-2-2015-1.pdf
To add to all this salt, they appealed, and got a so-called "expert's report" from a self-proclaimed "internet trolling expert" named Jonathan Bishop, who's probably threadworthy in and of himself, having looked into him and his blogs and suchlike. Needless to say, the appeal was BTFO'd because it didn't raise any actual points of law and simply contented itself with picking at the decision of the Judge. Who found that their claims of libel were groundless, that you cannot harass someone by failing to reply to their comments (as Paris & Garden alleged), and that it is not libellous to block someone for shitting up their blog with your nonsense and suchlike.
They've since had an order made against them for costs of £240,000.00, which appears to have been enforced by charging order and then order for sale. The most recent order is that unless Paris & Garden can pay off the costs by the end of this month, their home will be repossessed and forcibly sold. Naturally, they could have thought of that before embarking on an expensive doomed lolsuit, but we are where we are. They're trying to spin this, incidentally, as proof that the Judge and/or the parties' solicitors are also part of the organised covert harassment against them because the order is that the house be sold for "not less than £180,000" unless they can pay £240,000 by the end of the month, hence they're willing to lose £60,000 just to fuck with them.
This is, of course, wrong, and I can explain why as follows:
An order for sale in this form puts a lower limit on the sale price of the subject property as a safeguard against a claimant disposing of it at a fantastic undervalue and effectively getting "double bubble" by then continuing to enforce the judgement by other means. However it also reflects that a property sold forcibly at auction usually attracts a lower price than on the open market. If the property does go for only £180,000 then Paris & Garden will still owe the difference which can be enforced by any and all other means.
In support of their e-begging campaign to get asspats because they're the victim of a massive covert harassment and gang stalking campaign by skeptics and humanists, they've posted a number of questionable videos on YouTube taking issue with the judgement. Bit late for that, don't you think?
Here they are:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8s0TaFm-87AhnUU2lb2FXg
But having a look at the state of their Go Fund Me, they're not doing awfully well. They've even managed to fail at e-begging with a total distortion of the facts and similar.
They've apparently been "socially murdered" (their words not mine) and subject to covert and networked harassment, Byng and Lewis sent agents to spy on her ailing mother while she was in hospital, they allegedly lied about her being an astrologer to smear her, and so forth. Typical gang stalking stuff, though they've not claimed that they're being assaulted with electronic agony beams. Yet.
Amazingly, though, their Go Fund Me and their Youtube channel receives frequent updates, and they keep blogs in which they continue to snipe at Andy Lewis, Melanie Byng, and Richard Byng as well as asspatting Jeremy Corbyn and various other cranks. Yes, they believe in gang stalking. They also seem to cheerlead in favour of the Medical Innovation Act or the "Saatchi Bill" which was an act proposed by Lord Saatchi over here which would allow and encourage doctors to use prescription treatments on their patients which are supported not by robust peer reviewed science and clinical trials but by anecdotes. They have a particular bee in their bonnet about using sub-therapeutic doses of naltrexone (a drug used in alcohol dependency clinical detox) to cure cancer and seem to be under the impression that THEY are out to stop this becoming routine because it'll cut into THEIR profits.
And they also managed to dox themselves by uploading the unredacted witness statements they gave in the case. Their home (for now!) can be found at 9 Lon Bryngwyn, Swansea, Wales, SA2 0TX.
Future content? Almost certainly. They will continue to whine about how skeptics and humanists are all a giant cult who spit on and gang-stalk those who criticise them and how the Judge was biased against them or paid off or both:
Of course, should they find this thread then no doubt they'll be accusing us of being in league with, or even being, Melanie Byng and Andy Lewis. But at the end of the day. let's be reminded that this whole sorry affair, the lolsuit, the costs order, and similar, all stemmed out the fact that they lost their shit over the fact that one of their comments on a blog post wasn't published for eight hours.
I think that alone would make them threadworthy.
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/angelfearnot
https://www.facebook.com/sjparis
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/amazonnewsmedia
https://twitter.com/angelgarden
https://twitter.com/sjparis
Blogs:
Anarchangels
Amazon News Media
Archive links:
http://archive.md/gBrPK
http://archive.md/92KHe
http://archive.md/daJJj
