I can’t remember the last time I heard about Jacob Wohl, one of the nastiest pieces of shit to ever do stuff on behalf of the Republican party, but I now see that’s possibly because him and his mate Jack Burkman both got sued for one of those stunts—a robocall scheme targeting black voters to convince them not to vote—and got fined five million dollars for their efforts. Now someone else is fighting back for even more:
A Marine veteran and attorney claims his life fell apart after Wohl and Burkman falsely tarred him in a 2021 video as a child sex predator, according to an $11 million racketeering lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast.
In the aftermath, the unidentified Maryland man was let go from his law firm, lost a paid internship at Johns Hopkins University, was thrown out by his landlord, and was forced into bankruptcy, the lawsuit states. “John Doe” contends in the suit that Wohl and his co-defendant, soon-to-be-disbarred lawyer Jack Burkman, caused “irreparable harm” by laying waste to his reputation, wrecking his ability to earn a living, and turning him into a “critical casualty” of their “ongoing, illegal scheme.” […]
The complaint in Doe’s case centers around “Predator D.C.,” a low-rent web series aping NBC’s venerable true crime show, To Catch a Predator.
“We are doing hard hitting investigative journalism to expose predators in the heart of our nation’s capital,” Predator D.C.’s show page told prospective viewers, who were charged a minimum of $10 a month to tune in. “Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman conduct hidden-camera sting operations to expose predators who work within the highest levels of the U.S. Government.”
We still don’t know who this guy is, and I’d kind of love to cos I wonder why Wohl & Burkman went after him specifically. Or maybe it was just his damnable luck, I don’t know. I did think this detail was interesting:
The video also improperly described Doe as a married man, which the suit says Wohl believed “after seeing a photo of [Doe] online, in which [Doe] was wearing his Marine Corps dress blues with his wife at that time, who was African American,” the suit says.
So if they did specifically target him, did they do so because his (ex-)wife was black? I find that sadly believable… Either way, he is apparently not only a lawyer but a former Marine, so he is evidently disinclined to put up with this bullshit; apparently he turned on them in the original video and they kind of crumbled and promised not to use the footage, agreeing that he hadn’t in fact done anything wrong… except that then they did, of course, which is what led to all the ensuing trouble. I have a feeling brother Doe is going to romp home with this one…
