Clingy Guy Who Filed A SLAPP Suit Against Women He Dated Has Lawsuit Thrown Out… Immediately Refiles (Oh, And Also Gets Convicted For Tax Fraud)

Nikko D'Ambrosio has had a pretty rough week, but apparently that's not going to stop him from texting the court from a new number. You may recall this dude bro from the Chicago area, for his decision to sue basically everyone he could think of after a few women he dated wrote about their experiences with him on the Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy." We don't need to rehash just how stupid the lawsuit was, beyond the fact that it included tons of defendants who either appeared to have nothing to do with the case, or who were clearly immune under Section 230 (which wasn't even mentioned in the complaint).

People in a toxic subreddit who were cheering on the case (including at least a few commenters who appeared to be closely involved with it) kept insisting that the case would be a winner, even if all it did was make the women being sued spend a lot of money and be afraid to criticize dudes online again. Of course, that assumed a few things. Like that the case wouldn't get immediately thrown out.

Which it did.

Lawyer Ken White, who described this as being one of the most incompetent complaints he'd seen in a while, had predicted that whichever judge got the case was likely to toss it out before any of the defendants needed to do literally anything, because the lawyers (who seem ridiculously out of their depth) messed up the jurisdiction question, by claiming diversity jurisdiction (to get it into federal court, despite being about state laws) but not fulfilling the requirements for diversity (in multiple ways).

The biggest problem (but again, one of many) is that you only get diversity jurisdiction if all the defendants come from a different state than the plaintiff. But in the very complaint, they admit that at least a few defendants are also in Illinois.

And it turns out Ken was exactly right. The case has been terminated before anyone had to do anything.

Plaintiff asserts jurisdiction is proper pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1332 for diversity jurisdiction. In his complaint, the Plaintiff alleges he resides in the territorial jurisdiction of the District Court, which is Illinois. However, several of the named Defendants are also Illinois residents. The Court understands [r]esidency does not necessarily equate to domicile." Grandinetti v. Uber Techs., Inc., No. 19 C 05731, 2020 WL 4437806, at *4 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 1, 2020) (Chang, J.). However, the Plaintiff does not assert any other basis for his or the Defendants' domicile besides their residency; therefore, the Court equates the two here....

... Because it is well established that traditional diversity jurisdiction is destroyed when a plaintiff's and a single defendant's domicile is the same state, jurisdiction is improper.... Because the Court does not have subject matter jurisdiction over this case, the Court dismisses this case.

But apparently D'Ambrosio is the kind of guy who won't take no for an answer... even from judges. He's apparently the kind of guy that when his number gets blocked or his case gets thrown out, he'll just text from a different number or file a brand new case.

Almost immediately, D'Ambrosio's very, very, very bad lawyers filed a brand new lawsuit against the same defendants. And how do they get around the diversity issue? By simply removing the admission that some of the defendants live in Illinois, and instead saying whose citizenship and residence State is unknown at this time."

Here were some of the defendants in the first case:

And here they are in the second lawsuit, which now includes more other details, but magically forgot where they live. Shocking.

That sure seems like sanctionable behavior by the lawyers. The rest of the new lawsuit is still horrifically bad and confused.

The lawyers try (and I say that very, very, very loosely) to fix some of the other defects of the original lawsuit, but they certainly come off as very clueless lawyers and way out of their depth with basically no experience or knowledge in filing these types of lawsuits, reading all the Reddit comments mocking them, and doing a slipshod job of trying to fix the defects while being too ignorant to understand why those defects aren't the kind of thing you can just do a rewrite to fix.

For example, this time, they actually try (badly) to plead the factors to qualify as a class action, which they try to break down into subclasses," including a defamation subclass. Again, class action defamation is not actually a thing, because defamation requires specific statements made by specific people about specific people, and doesn't fit as a class action.

They also have finally discovered Section 230, which pretty obviously bars the claims against nearly all defendants. But, just because the lawyers have discovered Section 230, it does not mean they understand it. Because they don't. They claim it's an open question whether or not defendants are speakers" or publishers" under Section 230, and they think there is some action that can be taken that breaches Defendants immunity as an internet service provider under 47 U.S.C. 230." That's... not how it works.

Hilariously, in the actual defamation claim, they then admit that defendants are speakers' or publishers' within the meaning of 47 U.S.C. 230..." which seems like the lawyers admitting the case is barred by 230, since the whole point of 230 is that you can't treat third parties as speakers or publishers. And, of course, they still don't specify what actual statements are defamatory, but rather say that those statements imply that Plaintiff is dishonest, immoral and/or untrustworthy...." which, um, are all obviously protected statements of opinion.

There's also a very weak attempt to get around 230 by suggesting that the platform defendants like Meta, GoFundMe, and Patreon somehow created" the content in question (which they clearly did not). They also say that the IP" claims they're making are not barred by Section 230 but (and this is kind of hilarious) they don't actually make any IP claims.

There's more, but, no matter what, this is still a very poorly drafted complaint.

Either way, throughout the complaint, the lawyers claim that the statements made about D'Ambrosio really damage his reputation:

Defendants statements have damaged and continue to damage Plaintiff's reputation in the general public, in their profession, in their church communities, in their neighborhood, and with friends, relatives, and neighbors.

You know what else might damage Plaintiff's reputation in the general public, in their profession, in their church communities, in their neighborhood, and with friends, relatives, and neighbors? Being convicted of tax fraud.

Because that also happened to Nikko D'Ambrosio a week ago.

Chicago-area native Nikko D'Ambrosio made a national media splash earlier this month when he filed a lawsuit against dozens of women who allegedly bad-mouthed him on a tell-all Facebook dating page, describing him as clingy," a ghoster and a show-off with money.

Turns out D'Ambrosio's dating reviews were the least of his worries.

On Friday, D'Ambrosio, 32, of Des Plaines, was convicted in the same federal courthouse where his lawsuit is pending of tax fraud counts alleging he vastly underreported income he'd made distributing sweepstakes" gaming machines for a company with ties to Chicago mob figures.

So, um, when you've just been convicted of tax fraud and your defense consisted of claiming to be terrible at math," it's not clear you have much of a reputation that can be damaged. His lawyer literally called him stupid:

In his closing argument Friday, Grohman told the jury the case was not about greed, It's about stupidity."

I'm really not sure that some woman saying you were very clingy, very fast" is going to hurt your reputation any more than you've already hurt it yourself. And, while the tax fraud situation is probably the bigger deal, refiling the same lawsuit after it was dismissed isn't going to help his reputation very much either.