Here’s someone else, who could soon be getting the banhammer from the relevant authorities, to use the parlance of a website that’s best not named. On Wednesday, Mike got back from a visit to the hospital with Mrs. Mike to find he had a tweet from one Mark Lewis, a lawyer claiming to be acting for Rachel Riley and Tracey Ann Oberman. He wanted Mike to get in contact with him, and was threatening to take out a Norwich Pharmacal Order to disclose his address. He also claimed he had screenshots of Mike’s tweets.
Mike went out and took consultation from m’learned friends, who told him not to respond. Shaun Lawson, whose article is at the centre of all this, posted up a series of tweets explaining what it was all about, and how Lewis was really trying it on.
Riley, Oberman and their legions of moronic squadristi were offended by an article Lawson posted about how they had bullied and smeared a 16 year old schoolgirl as an anti-Semite, and then did the same to her father. The girl suffers from anxiety, and her mass abuse on twitter naturally caused her immense distress. Riley, whose only claim to fame is that she’s the woman who puts the letters on the board on Countdown, and Oberman, a Z-list actress were annoyed that Lawson’s account of their trolling and bullying had been widely reblogged and spread across social media. So they started threatening libel action against anyone who did so.
This what their lawyer, Lewis, is threatening to do. However, Lawson points out in his tweets about this matter that legally Lewis doesn’t have a leg to stand on. The article consisted mostly of tweets made by Riley and Oberman themselves, and is not libelous. He’s just fishing, and cannot take out a Norwich pharmacal order. Although to me, from his deranged and threatening behaviour, it may be that he himself needs a few pharmaceutical orders. Also, threatening people over twitter is against the guidelines of the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority. He already has form for this, having been fined £2,500 before for this. One Tweeter posted the internet address of his record and the 42-page judgement that the SRA issued against him.
And he may well get another one, as so far he’s tried to bully 76 people, some of whom know the law here as well as he does and have duly reported him.
Private Eye has a very sharp response from dodgy lawyers, who make baseless threats: Arkell vs Pressdram. It comes from a case in the 1970s when one of the parties sent a legal threat to the other, who responded succinctly: ‘F*** Off!’
The good peeps he threatened on twitter were not so crude, but they did tell him what he could do. They told him he should be ashamed of himself, particularly as he was now threatening to sue a 17 year old girl for blogging about the Riley and Oberman’s bullying. His actions were ‘heavy-handed’ and ‘churlish’ and showed Riley and Oberman in their true colours. He was also called an ambulance-chaser, with someone mockingly saying that they’d had an injury in the last three years, which wasn’t their fault. Would he mind acting for them? Which parodies the adverts for such ambulance-chasing firms on daytime television. Another Tweeter, Adam Vickers, asked him if he would stand up for a Palestinian friend of his, who had been attacked and harassed for supporting the victims of Israeli brutality. Others said it was all bullsh*t, and he was a creepy little weirdo.
As for Lewis himself, he and his partner fled the other year to Israel, claiming that they were doing so because of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe. This is true of continental Europe, perhaps, and especially eastern Europe. But the level of anti-Semitism in Britain, while rising, is certainly nowhere near an existential threat to Jews. Which means that Lewis is either another hysterical paranoid, very gullible, or he’s talking more Zionist propaganda.
Mike also took issue with a report in the Guardian, which said that Riley and Oberman were preparing to take legal action against 70 individuals in connection with their campaign against anti-Semitism in the Labour party, and that Lewis said that these tweets against them constituted harassment. Mike commented that it was really the other way round.
His article concluded
Perhaps this is a serious attempt at using the law to bully perfectly decent people, but it is clear that the people behind it cannot be taken seriously.
I’ll take it seriously when I see a reason to do so. Right now, I don’t.
If Lewis continues flagrantly continues to break the SRA’s regulations regarding such bullying, will it be long before we can expect him to be well and truly whacked with the banhammer and receive a visit from Mr. Struckoff?
Tags: 'Countdown, Abuse, Adam Vickers, anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Bullying, Ethnic Cleansing, Harassment, Labour Party, Lawyers, Libel, Mark Lewis, Mike Sivier, Palestinians, Private Eye, Rachel Riley, Schoolchildren, Shaun Lawson, Solicitors Regulatory Authority, Tracey-Ann Oberman, Twitter, Zionism
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