Judge Rejects Request for Reddit Info Tied to Allegations

A judge has rejected a request to make Reddit reveal the identities of anonymous users who raised sexual misconduct allegations against Royel Maddell, guitarist for the Australian duo Royel Otis. 

In a ruling issued late last year, a district court judge in Northern California called the request “overreaching” and “overburdensome.” The judge cited several gaps and lingering questions in Maddell’s (real name Leroy Bressington) application, including a lack of clarity over his intentions to file a defamation lawsuit, and the fact that he did not outright deny one of the main allegations against him: That he had sex with a minor. 

Lawyers for Bressington and reps for Royel Otis did not immediately return a request for comment. 

Bressington’s application centered on claims made last spring that he had a sexual relationship with a minor, who was also his music student. These were leveled on a now-deleted thread posted last year on the Triple J sub-Reddit (Triple J being Australia’s prominent youth-oriented, alternative music radio station). Other comments claimed that Bressington had been charged by authorities and dropped by a record label. 

(The allegations against Bressington, as NME noted, emerged around the same time Royel Otis were facing backlash over their song, “Moody,” and allegedly misogynistic lyrics like, “My girl’s a bitch when she’s moody.” The band issued an apology of sorts at the time, saying, “This song is written from a specific perspective, it is not intended to convey a broader view or standpoint about women in general. We apologize if anyone understood those lyrics otherwise.”)

According to court documents, Bressington first tried asking Reddit to hand over information about the users in the thread. After the platform refused, he filed an application in the District Court of Northern California to compel Reddit to hand over details such as IP addresses, cell phone numbers, email addresses, and/or names. Bressington said this user information was necessary so he could “contemplate” filing a defamation case if it turned out the users were based in Australia.

In denying Bressington’s application, Judge William Alsup noted that the guitarist’s lawyers hedged on filing a defamation lawsuit. Alsup wrote that the musician’s counsel said only that they would be “prepared to initiate” a defamation suit in Australia, not that they “would do so.” Alsup suggested this request for key discovery information was premature when Bressington had “not yet filed even a placeholder complaint against John Does in a foreign court,” or taken any other early legal action.

Alsup ultimately ruled that it was “not clear from the application whether Bressington ultimately would follow through on this threat” of litigation. One “indication” of this, he noted, was that while Bressington’s application denied ever being accused by an ex-partner, charged by an authority, or dropped by a record label, his application “has not specifically rejected as false one of the most basic assertions alleged: that when not a minor [Bressington] had sex with a minor.”