At least this one has some solid advice:
This should be a mandatory notice handed out to all parents before they give their kids any Internet access at all.
I guess ideally it would put the trolls who manipulated Hax$ in debt for life or in jail. They are the easiest scumbags to build a case around.
His mother wants revenge. You don't get a lawyer before you know how much you will be able to pay them. She said she has been "researching law firms for months now."
Yeah but he doesn't like to talk about it (other than those 20 times he said it on stream).
This isn't true, because it was an organized effort to shun and emotionally abuse a man and steal his only passion in life. There is a path for a "wrongful death" lawsuit. It is provable that the TO's actions directly led to Hax$'s suicide attempt and eventual passing. He was clearly manipulated and led on behind the scenes despite the foreknowledge they had of Hax$'s mental decline. You can argue that the case will not succeed, but the foundation for a wrongful death and/or defamation lawsuit is clearly there.
I don't know much about law, but my issue with this is that proving intent is almost impossible. You can say that the whole Smash organization was a bunch of dicks to him, and made a lot of mistakes, but it's going to be very hard to prove that they were doing it to making him harm himself, and without that you sorta have no case.
He was perma banned. There wasn't a process to return, exempting empty promises made by charlatans like iBDW. They cannot claim that they were "working with him" when it was radio silence even after his suicide attempt. You have many of these same T.O.'s and Leffen making patently false claims in the same time period like that he never apologized or was a far-right nazi sending them death threats. Regardless, these clowns are going to have to go to court, go through discovery, and pay for legal fees, all while facing heightened public scrunity that will surely attract attention from outside the Melee scene. It's possible that Hax$'s mom is privy to information that is not public, and it is also known that the NYC melee T.O.'s are particularly guilty of stripping Hax$ of his own tournament and then threatening to ban players for participating in any Hax$ sanctioned tournament. They essentially destroyed his livelihood and slandered his name, all while pretending to care about his "health," essentially gaslighting him and angling him as a public threat. There is ripe domain for litigation against those organizers like Mikey "The Cheat" and Willy P who championed these claims in publically shared announcements.
Yeah, I don't think saying "we think he might be a threat to Leffen so we're banning him from xyz events" is defamation. They'd have to have made statements that were provably untrue, such as in the recent Karl Jobst lawsuit, where Karl said Billy Mitchell caused someone to commit suicide. Maybe if they actually accused Hax of threatening to kill Leffen, or inciting people to do so, that might be defamation. However, I'm not sure they actually came out and said that so much as implied it.
Congratulations on reading far deeper into what I said than what I actually said.
Tailoring the lawsuit to individuals is a given. A lawyer will decide what individual(s), if any, can be held culpable. There is a mountain of data that is relevant here, and it is therefore plausible that Hax$'s mom could know more than we do. If she cannot meet a minimum threshold for legal grounds to sue (wrongful death, defamation, etc.) than she might settle for some kind of apology from the TO's or community reform. It is certainly plausible that she is using threats of a suit as a pretext for such motions.
Look, I saw the whole 2 hour video on this and as much as I want some people to get fucked over this, I really don't think there is a case.
Basically this.
It is a given that the lawsuit will be tailored to specific individuals. Surely, any lawsuit that is brought forward will be vetted by a lawyer first. She may hold the potential of such litigation as leverage over the TO's. She has already "won" the narrative for all intents and purposes outside of Reddit echo chambers, but no real concessions have been made. Billy Mitchell coerced Guiness Records to reinstate their records as they did not want a costly lawsuit, and he used the same tactic on Apollo Legend. I give no opinion on the ethics of such a tactic, but noone wants to get sued, and it is sane to avoid that in exchange for minor concessions. Something like an apology or new appeal process really isn't a big ask and is the kind of thing I could see them doing. It shouldn't take a lawsuit to make this happen, and reform would certainly be healthy for the community and repair their PR, (and in fact may be necessary for the community to survive as an intact entity).
There is certainly a good chance that she knows something we don't. The Civil court system is such a clown show in the US that she could possibly extract millions from these fuckers through "pain and suffering". But seriously, the people who have the most liability would be those Discord troons. They were maliciously harassing Hax. That in of itself is likely a crime of some sort. Add in the fact he killed himself and its probably more than just funny haha shit.
