The hot new publishing platform is a legal filing
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Filing a legal complaint is rapidly becoming the self-publishing option of choice for individuals looking to make explosive public allegations — regardless of whether they actually care about a judge finding in their favor.
Why it matters: In an era of steadily declining trust in media, the dry formalities of a legal template provide not only an imprimatur of institutional credibility, but also the freedom to go into extreme amounts of detail without seeming petty, tedious or self-indulgent.
Driving the news: Actress Blake Lively is in a war of legal filings with her co-star Justin Baldoni.
- Lively's complaint immediately changed her public reputation.
- As communications guru Lulu Cheng Meservey said on X: "What happens with the legal complaint from here? In my opinion, it doesn't even matter. She's won."
- Baldoni then filed his own lawsuit laying out his side of the story. It's framed as a defamation suit against the New York Times, but in practice fires back in the PR war with Lively. (The Times denied defaming Baldoni.)
Flashback: Similar tactics were employed by actress Sophie Turner, who fired off a legal complaint against her soon-to-be ex-husband that invoked international child abduction clauses through the Hague Convention.
- Legal filings have also been part of Drake's arsenal in his longstanding rivalry with Kendrick Lamar.
- Women have used lawsuits as a way to go public with accusations that powerful men — including Sean Combs and Leon Black — have committed sexual assault. (Both denied wrongdoing and neither were convicted of a crime, but the suits impacted both of their careers — and, in the case of Combs, helped land him in jail.)
When billionaire investor Bill Ackman wanted various Business Insider journalists and editors to be fired for publishing a story about his wife, he made public a 77-page letter from his lawyer, Elizbeth Locke.
- "The demand letter reads remarkably similarly to the pleadings of a lawsuit," Ackman noted on X. "If needed, we can convert the demand letter into a complaint and file a lawsuit."
- Ackman was clear that his end goal was to "end Business Insider's unethical and unprofessional practices" — which is not the kind of thing that can be forced by a judge in a court of law.
- Ackman demanded that then-Business Insider editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson be fired — something that Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of BI's parent company, reportedly seriously considered.
- Carlson has since departed the company for other pursuits, taking BI founder Henry Blodget with him. John Cook, the editor of the contentious articles, also departed, for the Wall Street Journal.
Where it stands: The internet has given the power of the printing press to everyone — but for that very reason, self-published posts on X or Medium or a personal blog are often treated with a healthy degree of skepticism, and serious journalists often avoid reporting on them.
- By framing allegations in the form of a legal complaint, accusers give themselves an institutional imprimatur, much as Émile Zola did when he published "J'Accuse" on the front page of the newspaper L'Aurore.
The bottom line: Lawsuits are often used just as a way of inflicting expensive litigation on others. Now they're also being used to try to bring about outcomes no jurist can hand down in judgment.
