I won my lawsuit!

Can we do a thing? Can we play a song? Can we play a song, some confetti? Coming down, some confetti. Yeah!

Hey, everyone. Lawthony Suitano here, the internet's legalest music nerd. And it's time for a review of a lawsuit that was recently filed against me and was hilariously dismissed. Before I begin, let me say I am absolutely not trolling in this video. There's no vegan cookie recipes or gags or any goofiness happening here.

Now, if this situation is alien to some of you guys watching, that may partially be because I was pretty quiet on the topic as it's been happening. And this whole legal to do has been ongoing since the end of last year. And over the course of all of this, I didn't go through the usual YouTube drama channel rigmarole of, "Oh, no, look at me. I'm in legal trouble. Donate to my Indiegogo,“ which is not to knock anybody who does that sort of thing, or say that I won't have to do that thing at some point in the future, because I understand lawsuits can get pretty expensive. But I didn't want to blow this up into something bigger than it needed to be.

And also on top of it, I didn't really want to give the person who was suing me the satisfaction of maybe seeing me squirm or just for him to have the capacity to read into anything that I'm doing or saying or just cause more of a fuss over this because it was pretty clear from the start, what this person was seeking was some reaction from me, a takedown, a payment. And as a result, I think it just made more sense to handle this in a quiet, mature, adult fashion.

Now, who exactly am I talking about here, the man who sued me? Why it's the most amazing musician walking the planet today, of course, Mr. Ronald Radke. Hi, Ronald. I know you're watching. Love ya. Thank you for paying me back my legal fees, but we will get into that later.

Mr Ronald Radke, if you're unfamiliar, is the singer, songwriter, rapper, frontman of the band Falling in Reverse. And before the year 2023, I was living in what I consider to be the pre-Ronald chapter of my existence, a blissful dream-like time when I barely even knew who this man was. In fact, you can even go back into my YouTube content history on all my channels and see it's not like I've been talking about this man and his music for years.

I've been doing The Needle Drop for over a decade now, but I've only started talking about Ronald's antics and his music recently. But Ronald Radke, being the "Popular Monster" that he is, he couldn't stay off my radar forever, especially as I was seeing him on social media in the last few years, just constantly going after and attacking people commenting on him and his music, whether it be content creators or even just random fans.

And I'm not talking about a quick reply or a snappy clapback or something like that. You only need to spend 10 minutes on this man's Twitter or his TikTok to see him absolutely obsessing over every negative thing that is said about him.

"What's up, guys? I'm going to read some comments from some of the ugliest, most disgusting, fattest, stinkiest-looking people I've ever seen in my fucking life that probably just masturbated the idea of being with me, but will never be able to be with me because I'm so far out of all of their leads that even if they bought a VIP meet and greet and I saw their face, they wouldn't even be allowed to meet me." - Ronald Radke

Often, the way he engages with this criticism says more about him than the person he's replying to, like tweets from 2024 where he talks about being a violent felon, ex-drug addict, multimillionaire, multi-platinum selling recording artist, cultured and well-traveled with common sense, handsome, 40 years old, and looks younger than most 25-year-olds.

So it only took me a handful of examples of seeing behavior like this to start wondering, why is this guy so loud and insecure and annoying? So of course, I started reading more of his social media posts, looking at various articles about him, looking into his criminal record because, again, this is a guy who proudly portrays that he is a violent ex-felon on the Internet.

So, yeah, it didn't take me long to come to the determination, my own personal opinion, that this guy sucks. And so I wrote and recorded a video called This Guy Sucks, which addressed all the reasons that he sucked.

Now, it was one of our more thoroughly researched videos that week because I thought the likelihood was going to be pretty high that Ronald would see this video and not like it very much, and that maybe, possibly, I would become the object of his affection. I'm not bragging here, but I would say the video had about that effect.

If you don't believe me, Ronald completely unprompted, dressing up like me for Halloween. The man is in a roleplay. And to add some irony to this man's defamation suit, he also alleges in the Twitter post that, I like reading sex books to second-graders.

After posting that, this man, honest to God, filed a defamation suit against me, which again is funny because number one, he's not very careful with his own words. And two, another reason this is funny is that Ronnie historically likes to revel in just how bad his reputation is.

So yeah, Ronald Radke didn't really take all that kindly to the This Guy Sucks video. However, it seemingly took a while for it to really get under his skin. After all, that COVID dropped in 2023, but it wouldn't be until the following year that he would really begin crashing out over it.

He even made an almost 10-minute TikTok response to the video where at one point he offers to pay my ex $250,000 to come work for him and tell him all of my secrets.

“$250,000 a year starting offer right now. You come work for us. You want to play games, Anthony? I could play some games, and I'm a good person. You're going to see just how good of a person I on how I treat your ex-wife.” - Ronald Radke

Which is very normal behavior that a normal person engages in who is normal. But yeah, when it comes to the lawsuit Ronald ultimately filed, it took him a minute to really build up to it. He spent days tweeting about me on Twitter saying, He's going to sue me. He's going to sue me. He's going to sue me. He's going to sue me.

“Sir, this makes you liable in court. I will sue the ever-living beep out of your ass. You don't realize that I will use every last dollar.” - Ronald Radke

He was also doing some deep dive research into my background, too, really hacking into the matrix and digging up very hard to find personal information like, I live in San Diego. I didn't really say anything because who am I to stand in the way of such impressive detective work?

Now, you might be thinking, Anthony, that's crazy. Why would somebody think that? That's a crazy thing to think. Someone would have to be stupid to think such a thing. Well, no, I kid you not, because Ronald, in fact, followed through with his lawsuit, filed the originally in California, and sued the wrong Anthony Fantano.

You heard that correctly. Apparently, there's another Anthony Fantano out there in America, and Ronald found that Anthony Fantano, and sued him. It took a while for Ronald and his legal team to realize this error. And when I did eventually get served this lawsuit right here, as you can see from the photo on the screen, it has my wrong initial in there, presumably because they didn't even change the name after suing the wrong Anthony Fantano.

From this point, we're getting deep into the weeds of very boring legal rigmarole, so I will try to keep it mostly to the good and interesting bits.

Now, while it is true, I do not live in California. The state where I live actually has a law on the books that copies a California law, an anti-SLAPP law.

You may be asking, Anthony, what's anti-SLAPP? Well, it allows defendants to file a special motion to dismiss when a complaint is based on the opposing party's exercise of its right of free speech, right to petition the government, or right of association under the US or CT Constitutions.

Essentially, what this allowed me to do was essentially tell the court, I believe I am just exercising my free speech and my journalistic rights, and the only reason this lawsuit is being filed is to silence me, essentially. So after filing this, if the judge found that in their own opinion to be true, after looking at all of the facts of the case, of course, then this whole thing could essentially be dismissed with Ronnie owing me legal fees that I've had to shell out over the course of the process.

Because, yes, keep in mind none of this is happening to me for free. I basically had to pay out of the ass every step of the way this whole thing. Retaining a lawyer costs money, filing the anti-SLAPP costs money, negotiations from there costs money. So please watch the hell out of this video and hit the like button.

All that money and this very tense process is understandably going to make even me, who was very confident in my rights here, break a sweat. However, all of the headlines and Ronnie’s tweets and his crashouts and announcements on this topic publicly essentially put me in a position where I was like, I have to see this through. I can't just allow this to quietly settle in his favor or anything like that, because that's going to send the message that anybody who hates me can essentially just pull up with lawyers anytime I say something they don't like and shut me down entirely.

And honestly, fuck that. You don't become the biggest music critic in the world by folding like a bitch.

ALeo, knowing Ronald's history of going after anybody and anybody that has a little bit of criticism for him online. I also wanted to see this through so that other content creators out there could see that Ronald is not unbeatable, and he's just a big annoying bully. Allegedly, that's my opinion. That's my opinion of the guy.

Fast forwarding toward the end of this thing, and our lawyers are having oral arguments in front of the judge. And I shit you not, Ronald's legal team legitimately tried to argue that part of the reason my comments about him were so damaging was that he's not even actually famous.

Yeah, he's just a small bean, a little guy. And I'm like, the big bad buff, sexy, hot, just volumptuous music reviewer who's just towering over his little weak baby body. And he's, oh, my God, he's just so powerless in my shadow.

Again, if you spend any lick of time on Ronnie’s social media, you will see very quickly, very immediately, this man thinks he's one of the biggest artists in the world of all time ever. So yeah, that argument doesn't exactly gel with his very twisted reality.

Thankfully, the judge saw through this like any rational person would. I'll hand that to Judge Shah for the banging decision that I got here in this anti-SLAPP dismissal. I will actually quote from some of the portions here.

Here's an interesting bit that essentially talks about how I based my video on well-known elements of Ronald's reputation. Again, he is the ”Popular Monster,” after all.

“The plaintiff was named by music news outlet, Loudwire, as one of the most controversial singers in rock and metal as a result of his criminal history, allegations of sexual abuse and incendiary political statements.“

That’s not me saying that. That's a quote. That's the judge, Ronald. Don't call your lawyer up, please.

The judge also cited that in the midst of all of this, Ronald had a lot of unhinged, unfounded personal attacks that he launched against me, including saying that my viewership was made up of paid bots from India.

The judge also said that my video spoke to public concern as well, saying that speech that involves a matter of public concern includes issues of economic or community well-being and other regulatory matters. This would appear to include unethical behavior alleged against a regulated professional. Indeed, public allegations that someone is involved in crime generally are a matter of free speech of public concern.

Another section here in the decision has more to do with me than with Ronald, because personally, I just love that that the term “sussy wussy” was included in an official legal document of this sort because of my word choice in my original video about Ronald, sussy wussy, which is a legal term.

“Perhaps most directly, the plaintiff's premise of malice is contradicted by the portion of the video where the defendant states that charges against the plaintiff were dismissed. True. But the fact that all this behavior is piling up is quite ‘sussy wussy’.”

Also sorry to whoever had to type out sussy wussy. I apologize. I won't do it again.

The judge also found it very interesting that Ronald's TikTok video about me essentially included an admission that when I talk about him, I'm racking up his algorithms and just making him more popular and more successful, essentially.

“All of you’ve done has helped me because all of your fans will come to my comments and just rack up my algorithms, and maybe I'll catch a couple incel fans from your fans.”

Which, yeah, I mean, statements like that undercut any claim of damages that you might have. So there you go. Ronald Radke being the author of his own undoing once again.

And yeah, as a result of Ronald losing this, he had to pay me legal fees. But of course, not before uploading a bitter ass video to the Falling in Reverse YouTube channel, which is actually such a mess of a video, but loaded with some interesting points that I do want to address. So I wanted to say at the end of this video here, I am going to go over a lot of Ronald points in that video. Just not going to do it here because it's just such a shit lasagna that I have to unpack.

But still, maybe my favorite parts of that video are when Ronald essentially admits multiple times that this lawsuit was doomed from the start, but he just had to do it and had to go through it anyway for the principle of the whole thing.

“The reason why I'm making this video is because I sued Anthony Fantano, and my lawyers told me, there’s a small chance you will win this. But that's not why I sued him. I sued him so I can make this video right now.” - Ronald Radke

That along with other things said in Ronald's video, I will address in another upload. I just felt it important to do this separately because I just wanted to talk about my own experience here being sued. And while, yeah, it was not super positive, it was necessary.

And as my lawyer, Emilio, told me, shout out to Emilio, there is seriously important historical precedent to this decision because there's not a whole lot of lawsuits quite like this one in the modern era where someone in the music commentary space is having to defend themselves in quite this way.

Sure, while I could have potentially saved myself a headache by paying Ronald some money and taking the video down. After doing that, I know I wouldn't have been able to look at myself in the mirror because that would have been a betrayal of how I actually felt and most likely would have created a lot more headaches down the road. And yeah, we are now just pretty much going to start getting back to business once I'm done addressing all this to-do.

There you go. Thank you for watching. Let me know what you think about all this in the comment section. I'm sure you will, and you're the best.

Anthony Fantano, court system, forever.

Sussy wussy, bro.