In and around 2023, Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were subject to a horrific campaign of online harassment. Unfortunately they blamed me for it, and in turn wrote and published an astonishing array of articles making false accusations against me. Last year, I sued them in the high court in London. In turn, they countersued me for harassment. The case was heard last month and I'm pleased to say that the counterclaim was dismissed and I prevailed in my case. The court awarded me £70,000 in damages.
@mjg59 heh, I loled at 66... we all have our famous skeletons in the closet. Glad yours didn't haunt you in a meaningful way.
@mjg59 good to see the judgment (sic) in your favour. It's sad reading, though, and I would put a few beans on "they dig their heels in" as a bet on the next step. The waste of human potential here is quite obvious.
@mjg59 How much productive things you could have probably done in the time when dealing with such unfortunate stuff. Glad that this seems to be over.
@mjg59 Congrats - and well done on getting a judge who actually seems to understand things invented in the last 100 years!
@alexhudson @mjg59 yep, entirely predictably this is exactly what now appears to be happening. He just doesn't know when to stop digging
@mjg59 court judgements are interesting reading! The judge of so much effort into laying out all the arguments - in relatively plain language, too. The final sentence of yours is a nice one, too :-)
@mjg59 Interesting reading! I have to admit, this is the first time I hear of this, and I haven't read the libelous articles before. They are supposed to be in Annex A, but that seems to be missing from the judgement. Is that usual? It makes the reasoning of the court a bit harder to follow.
@mjg59 Congrats, nobody should ever have to deal with what you went through (and continue to go through because he has not taken the content down).
Does this mean he is in contempt of court? Jail time?
Last week, Rianne Schestowitz applied for permission to appeal the judgement. This was rejected today.
@mjg59 Some people just can’t recognize when a court has handed them their own arse
The next step will likely be an order including an injunction requiring the removal of the offending articles and forbidding any repetition of the baseless claims.
@mjg59 Do you have any say in the wording of the summary of the judgement they were ordered to publish? Do you get to negotiate for a form of words acceptable to you both? For their sakes I sincerely hope they’re not stupid enough to publish anything *attacking* the judgement, but based on their conduct so far …
@dpk There is typically a requirement that the wording be agreed by both parties, and imposed by the court if agreement can't be reached.
@mjg59 I remember seeing their names many years ago on twitter and being disgusted at the BS they were talking about. Crazy that so many years later, they haven't changed.
@mjg59 finally getting around to reading the judgement, and: wow. yikes. (was not aware that the names you had mentioned were dr. & mrs. techrights, but … dang)
@mjg59 “They are clearly nowhere near any such thing.” sometimes the system works I guess
@mjg59 I must admit, I thought posting https://techrights.org/n/2025/11/25/Court_s_Decision_Misused_in_Attempt_to_Hide_Transphobia_Censori.shtml after losing was very courageous of them...
The order has now been agreed on by the court and will likely be formally issued on Monday. The Schestowitzs are required to remove all posts that repeat the false claims (not merely the posts that were the subject of the litigation) by 4PM on the 16th of December, along with payment of damages and costs.
@mjg59
What's the remedy if they refuse to comply or are unable to pay?
@FritzAdalis if they refuse, potentially contempt of court and jail time. If they're unable, potentially bankruptcy.
@purpleidea I'm going to choose not to link to the stuff defaming me because well
@mjg59 Yeah it wasn't to encourage more defaming of course, but to rather understand what the bar of defamation here looks like... In the judgment I didn't even see a list of links. Does the new order have that? Can you link to that?
@purpleidea https://techrights.org/wiki/Matthew_J_Garrett/ gives a pretty solid overview
@mjg59 wow they have a whole page about you! I guess I don't want to be famous, haha! I can't imagine what (no offence) actually famous people must go through!
Who's doing all the IRC harassment against them? Any ideas?
AFAICT they think it's you because your account logged off at the same time as one of the harassers? Like don't they have better evidence? A netsplit could cause that same thing, can't it?
Glad you're past it! What a weird website!
The order has now been officially issued and I've put a copy at https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/order.pdf . The Schestowitzs have indicated that they intend to appeal the order, but have not as yet indicated their grounds for doing so. My understanding is that this does not remove their obligation to follow the terms of the order.
@mjg59 Is the extremely direct second-person language on that first page normal legal practice or was it specifically thought necessary in this case?
@mjg59 Hopefully, the situation will be fully resolved quite soon. Best wishes, and sorry you’ve had to endure that. 🙏🏻
@mjg59 Obviously I want this to go away as much as anyone, but the interest rate on the damages in (4) is impressive. My reading of the guidelines is up to 10% on top of the base rate so 14% which would be £9.8K not £13K. Then again I'm not the lawyer here!
@ross Not familiar with the details of this case, but I would sadly imagine there's a good chance of the full amounts here never being paid :(
@ross Interest is due from when a part 36 offer to settle is rejected, which happened about 18 months ago IIRC
@ross the idea is that if you reject a settlement offer that's better than what you get given in court, you've wasted everyone's time and money and so you should need to pay more costs and also the interest from the point where you rejected the settlement
@mjg59 Yeah, I seem to remember that was part of Murdock's approach to the hacking scandal to make the cases go away.
@mjg59 That's a 404 (which I don't understand because there are clearly people here who have read it)
@denisbloodnok Whoops I upgraded the storage in my server without making sure I'd synced everything I'd touched today, should be there now?
@mjg59 If you're still planning to donate to charity, a good option is Rainbow Railroad. Techrights is a den of transphobia, it would be fitting.
Today Roy Schestowitz made a post including the claim (re: me) that "the Microsoft connection was affirmed under oath". This is ironic - I have never worked for Microsoft, and the strongest claim made under cross examination is that I have social relationships with some Microsoft employees who may have visited my home. On the other hand, public records show that Roy's home in Manchester is owned by a relative who is a senior engineer at Microsoft. Microsoft money apparently bought his house.
@mjg59 It's bizarre that they have such an axe to grind with you. I'm glad things have been going in your favor.
@mjg59 This seems like a brave move. I'm sure it definitely won't backfire on him...
@mjg59 every time you post stuff about this I go look at a couple of the latest posts and come to the conclusion that he is not a well person. It’s quite sad really.
@mjg59 that kind of implies their ability to cough up the £160k+ award and costs in short order will be limited.
Crazy that they let it drag out to this point.
As a fellow target of Roy Schestowitz's false propaganda (not at the level Roy attacked @mjg59, of course), I appreciate that you adjudicated this.
Litigation is risky & difficult even when it's obvious who is correct. I thank you & the Court for working to the just conclusion.
Note there are ppl in the #FreeSoftware community who (for years) collaborated with Roy to spread lies about their political enemies. I hope this ruling also quells that behavior.
Today the court provided the order regarding costs and the publishing of a summary of the case: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/order2.pdf . The Schestowitzs must publish a summary of the case by 4PM on the 16th (tomorrow) and keep it there for at least 6 months, and must pay my costs by the 23rd. This is in addition to the previous order (https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/case/order.pdf) that requires all the offending claims be removed by 4PM tomorrow, along with payment of damages.
An interesting part of the first order is that it requires removal of all posts that make claims determined to be defamatory, not just the posts that were the subject of the case - over 100 additional posts were made after the case was filed that repeated aspects of the claims, and these must also be removed by 4PM London time tomorrow
@mjg59 man, what a nightmare. its absolute shit you had this dumped in your lap and had to deal with it
(The documents I've posted are all part of the public record - anyone can obtain them from CEFile)
I should note that the case summary has already been published on Techrights and Tuxmachines, and look forward to the Schestowitzs complying with the rest of the order
I've had a couple of people ask what happens if they don't fully comply with the orders - the answer is that they can be held in contempt of court, which can result in a range of penalties up to imprisonment (https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rules/part-81-applications-and-proceedings-in-relation-to-contempt-of-court).
@mjg59 I notice the order didn't specify the text of the link from the landing page, just "a prominent headline". I would have expected it to require them to use the headline of the summary. Also, the pages containing the order don't have a <title> tag (or even <html>/<head>/<body>), which might be construed as interfering with indexing, since there's no page title for the search engines to show.
Pleased to see that the Schestowitzes have removed the publications that were the subject of the case - however, they have not (as far as I can tell) followed the requirement to remove any other pages that repeated the defamation (11(c))
Rianne Schestowitz has indicated that the Schestowitzes have filed for bankruptcy. If true, their assets (including personal property and domain names) will be sold to recover as much of the debt to me as possible, and my understanding is that the remaining debt will then be discharged after 12 months.
@mjg59 Any idea why they continued blaming you? Someone who runs a tech website for 20 years should be able to understand how flimsy the “simultaneous timeout” argument is.
@mjg59 Interestingly, the search index still has them (https://techrights.org/search/query?search=Search&query1=mjg59&set1=any) which probably counts as a "page repeating the claims"?
@mjg59 time to follow in the footsteps of The Onion and try to get control of those domain names?
@mjg59 Yeh that doesn't surprise me too much; you didn't think this was going to be easy do you?
@mjg59 how badly can someone screw up their own bankruptcy doing it pro se?
@marypcbuk I believe the system is actually designed for this - someone is appointed to manage it
@mjg59 @marypcbuk I do wonder if they think it is like US bankruptcy and haven't yet understood just how much control the trustee will have over their lives and finances.
On the one hand, one might feel sorry for them for being in this position. Personal bankruptcy is a terrible thing to go through.
On the other hand. Well they brought it on themselves now, didn't they.
@mjg59 @jeroen94704 sunk cost fallacy? if they were to admit they were wrong (about anything ever), it would crater their sense of self because they would have to admit that they brought much of this on themselves by never stopping digging the hole
@marypcbuk @mjg59 RIP their sense of self after this verdict then, I guess.
@wouter @mjg59 part of me would probably feel bad too. But I don't think Matthew has any reason at all here to feel guilty. They had every opportunity to stop what they were doing, to settle, even to just stop for a minute, sit down and reflect on how compelling the "evidence" they thought had against him really was, and whether it would hold up in court. I doubt that even now they have accepted they got it wrong. It's a hole of their own digging and they only have themselves to blame
@marypcbuk @mjg59 @jeroen94704 there is and always has been a deeply obsessive, myopic quality to that site that's reminiscent of the word salad babble you see from mentally ill people. It's definitely not quite on the same level as eg. Gene Ray (the Time Cube guy), but I suspect that you'd have just as much luck trying to convince Roy Schestowitz he was wrong about something as you'd have trying to convince Gene Ray
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