Last year, embattled Arizona lawyer Charles Carreon brought a lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, doubling down by suing anonymous Internet commenters and even two charities, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. (The whole crazy story also involved a cartoon of an obese woman asking a bear to "Come hurr and love meeee!") Things got even weirder when Carreon threatened Chris Recouvreur, also known "Satirical Charles," who had created a website mocking Carreon. Recouvreur then sued Carreon in federal court for a declarative judgement that his site was not libelous.
Now Carreon says he regrets the entire affair. Why? Largely because it has unleashed the wrath of angry people on the Internet and has subsequently damaged his reputation online.
“I genuinely say it was a dumb thing,” Carreon told Ars. “This is not a soluble problem. This is not a problem that is soluble with a legal cease-and-desist letter, or a counter cease-and-desist letter. I would not have sent that and I really reassess the decision thoroughly. It was not a good idea. You really are dealing with a situation that is not amenable to legal resolution.”
“I made it worse”
Carreon was a little-known lawyer until June 2012, at which point he began representing the website FunnyJunk.com and sued Matthew Inman, demanding $20,000 over comments Inman had made about FunnyJunk's habit of hosting Inman's cartoons. Inman then turned around and raised $100,000, giving that money to charity instead of to Carreon, at which point Carreon escalated his legal filings. At one point, Carreon even threatened to subpoena Ars Technica. (Ars’ collected coverage of the entire affair can be read here.)
In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, "rapeutated." In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you'd like to see a picture of Carreon's critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated.
In short, Carreon portrays himself as the victim here—he’s now become the victim of the Streisand effect, or as it might now be called, the Carreon effect.
“So when you take a situation in which the legal rules don’t impose any effective sanctions on people for that kind of behavior, mob behavior on the Internet, then a legal analyst like myself should look at that situation and say: ‘You can’t fix everything that’s broken,’” he said. “There is not a proper legal remedy for it. I attempted to do something and I made it worse.”
“It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”
But lest the Internet think that Carreon is a bad guy with a continual ax to grind, he suggested that his Buddhist religion can help him forgive those who have wronged him.
“If I feel that something that I have said should not have been said, and somebody calls it to my attention, I generally will alter or retract it,” he said. “[Similarly,] if anyone wants to contact me in any reasonable manner, I will be happy to hear it. The point of speech is to spark discussion. My goal is to help people to realize that you’re not the only person who gets rapeutated. You need to put on your own psychological resources together to survive it. Of course this is difficult. The fact that I try to bear it with aplomb, it is difficult. Yeah, I have a lot of shit to process—I’m glad I'm a resilient person.”
“It doesn’t matter what my intentions are,” he added. “I’m learning the rules of the game. I’ve learned about mobs. I’ve learned about how blithely we can deal with other people. I never thought that people would say things about me that they did. I’m always learning. If I didn’t learn, I would truly be stupid. The fact that I learn slowly or don't know things that other people know, that doesn't make me genuinely stupid, it makes me situationally stupid.”
The easy way or the hard way
Though the legal battles sparked by Carreon's actions have ceased, it's up to Recouvreur's attorney, Paul Alen Levy of Public Citizen, to recover the money. Levy told Ars on Wednesday that it would be very easy for Carreon to finally wrap up this entire story.
“He makes a payment, we agree that he’s made the payment, and there’s a satisfaction of judgement,” Levy said. “That’s the simple way to do it.” If not, Levy will have to go through legal discovery to determine the size of Carreon's assets.
Levy said there isn’t a chance that he and his client will allow the case to be dropped without any consequences for Carreon.
“Given the amount, it’s hard to walk away from it,” he said. “We’re not willing to let the money just sit there. I really don’t know at this point what assets [Carreon] has. He has a law practice. Presumably he’s getting paid at his law practice—but you hate to think about that.”
As for Carreon, he wouldn't be pinned down on whether he would pay, but he did say that the whole ordeal had been a strain.
“Whenever you have to spend a lot of time doing stuff that is not remunerative, that is financial hardship,” Carreon said. “If somebody is making me do stuff by suing me, sure, it’s taking a bite out of my time.”