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By CARLOS PEDRAZA | OCTOBER 6 2021 | 8 MIN. READ
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Peters Wins Extended Protective Order Against Shawn O’Halloran in Georgia
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MONROE, Ga. — A Walton County judge granted Axanar producer Alec Peters’ request Tuesday for an extended protective order after an altercation at DragonCon with his ardent online critic, Shawn O’Halloran.
Peters told Judge Cheveda D. McCamy he and his girlfriend, Crysstal Hubbard, now feared for their lives from O’Halloran after the incident. “We think he will try again,” he said in his closing statement.
O’Halloran’s attorney, Dustin Kirby, cited case law to show his client’s online interactions, all conducted as posts in public Internet forums, failed to rise to direct contact of the kind defined by Georgia’s anti-stalking law.
The DragonCon incident was a unique “one-off [face-to-face] event” in the pair’s dealings with one another, Kirby told the judge. She disagreed.
”This rises above a back-and-forth on Facebook,” McCamy ruled. O’Halloran admitted he “took the opportunity to embarrass” Peters, she said. To Kirby’s assertion that O’Halloran had not stalked Peters, she stated her ruling was not a finding of cyberstalking. “It is just a protective order,” she stated.
The order she finally signed, however, does declare O’Halloran “knowingly and willfully violated” Georgia’s anti-stalking statute. That law, however, requires “a pattern of harassing and intimidating behavior, and which serves no legitimate purpose.”
Granting the protective order was a civil action, however, not a criminal one; O’Halloran was not convicted of stalking. That would’ve required a criminal prosecution. Instead, the judge appeared to believe she found sufficient reason for Peters to be afraid of O’Halloran and therefore granted the order.
”I’m certainly disappointed in the court’s ruling today,” O’Halloran said. “I’ve discussed this with my counsel, and all options are on the table for the future regarding this issue, including a possible appeal.”
According to Kirby, Peters failed to demonstrate that O’Halloran’s Facebook posts constituted “contact,” and that without the six-year history Peters was trying to construe as harassment under Georgia law, he lacked the pattern of behavior required by the law.
Peters, who represented himself at the hearing, portrayed himself as a victim of years of harassment by O’Halloran on Facebook. Under questioning by Kirby, he admitted that none of O’Halloran’s posts, while naming him, were directly addressed to him, and that he relied on other people to send him copies of O’Halloran’s posts.
In questioning Peters about the DragonCon incident, Kirby asked Peters how he felt threatened by O’Halloran’s phone, which Peters had swatted out of O’Halloran’s hands. “Have you not seen phones with mace, or laser pointers or guns?” Peters asked.
Peters also accused O’Halloran of planting numerous people at DragonCon to create the incident, including the eyewitness who appeared on video who told responding police Peters was the one who acted violently in the incident after taking O’Halloran’s phone and refusing to relinquish it.
Peters provided no evidence to support his allegations. In his cross-examination of O’Halloran on the stand, Peters asked him, “How many people did you engage [in setting up the DragonCon confrontation]?”
O’Halloran replied that former Peters employee Dean Newbury, who has described himself as a previous target of Peters’ vexatious litigation, shot video of the incident in addition to O’Halloran’s own recording.
”You made no mention to Paul Jenkins [ahead of planning the confrontation]?” Peters asked. “No,” O’Halloran replied. McCamy cut off Peters’ line of questioning when he tried to submit evidence to supposedly support the contention, and had both parties move on to closing statements.
Owing perhaps to the long list of other requested protective orders on an impatient McCamy’s calendar, she never saw the two video recordings of the incident. That evidence, however, will likely be front and center at the other court proceeding arising out of the DragonCon confrontation.
Still to be scheduled: Peters’ criminal hearing in Atlanta for simple assault arising out of the same incident at DragonCon.
Final words. As Peters exited the courtroom he asked his companions, “Did Carlos leave early?” before realizing he was standing right next to the AxaMonitor reporter, then continuing, “I guess you’re not going to write about this, are you Carlos?”
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Video of Alec Peters’ altercation with Shawn O’Halloran is at odds with Peters’ account in court.
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Peters Supporters Claim AxaMonitor Ejected from Georgia Courtroom for Breaking Recording Rules
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Within hours after Axanar producer Alec Peters won a year’s extension of a protective order against his critic, Shawn O’Halloran (pictured), Peters’ supporters began claiming AxaMonitor reporter Carlos Pedraza was ejected from the courtroom for bringing a recording device.
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No cell phones. Reece Watkins posted on Facebook: “There was a prominent sign as I turned into the parking lot stating that cell phones were not allowed in any courtroom. …Carlos is being disingenuous at best, flat-out lying at worst. … But the bailiffs reacted more quickly to any phone they saw on the second floor, where the Superior Court rooms were located.”
Rules allowing cell phones as recording devices. While Watkins is correct that under the rules of the Superior Court, generally cell phones are not allowed, the Georgia Supreme Court mandated to all lower courts in Rule 22 (prominently displayed on the Walton County courts website) that recording devices (specifically including smartphones) are allowed subject to a formal request sent to the judge at least 24 hours prior to the scheduled hearing, which AxaMonitor’s was.
Holding a hearing. Watkins further claimed that the judge is required to hold a hearing before granting such a request, “Carlos knew no hearing was held, so had absolutely no justification for walking into the courtroom with a cell phone. None.” This is false.
Rule 22. A plain reading of Rule 22 states that a hearing is required only if the judge “intends to deny the request or a portion of the request, or if a party, witness, or alleged victim objects to a request. The hearing … shall be part of the official record of the proceeding.”
- Presumed granted. Rule 22 also presumes a judge will grant the request: “A properly submitted request for recording should generally be approved, but a judge may deny or limit the request.” Any denial, however, is itself reviewable under the law.
- Denial. The rule also requires the judge to justify the denial “only after making specific findings on the record” [emphasis mine] that there is a substantial likelihood of harm arising from one or more of nine factors laid out in the rule.
Reason to believe. Having heard nothing from the judge in the more than 24 hours since submitting the request, Pedraza said he “had every reason to believe I was likely to have had my request approved. I openly showed my phone to the security officers at the building entrance, who cleared me to go up to the courtroom, once I explained my pending recording request under Rule 22, to hash it out up there with the judge’s bailiffs. Upon my arrival, then, I stepped outside the courtroom to talk to the bailiffs, who were trying to locate the judge’s administrative assistant to clear it up. Once it became clear they couldn’t find my fax, I re-entered to cover the hearing by using my written notes.”
Crowing. Nonetheless, Colin Krapp, admin of the Real Truth About Axanar Facebook group, crowed, “So tell me, who is whose bitch? Who got spanked? And who got thrown out of the courtroom for having a phone against court rules?”
- Caught in a lie? Krapp continued, “Self-proclaimed ‘journalist’ Carlos Pedraza [was] caught in a lie and working hard to spin being escorted out of a Georgia courtroom today after being caught with a cell phone despite warnings against bringing one into the proceedings.”
- Spinning isn’t required when the court’s own rules specify otherwise.
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Why Nasty Facebook Posts Aren’t Cyber-Stalking
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Shawn O’Halloran’s attorney, Dustin Kirby, cited Georgia case law to try to convince Walton County Superior Court Judge Cheveda D. McCamy that his client’s and Axanar producer Alec Peters nasty Facebook posts about one another didn’t qualify as the six-years-long cyberstalking campaign claimed by Peters in court Tuesday.
Though O’Halloran’s case did not prevail before the judge, the case cited by Kirby is interesting for its ruling that website posts by one person addressing another did not suffice as "contact" under Georgia’s stalking statute, “especially when defendant did not cause posting to be delivered to plaintiff.”
That case, Chan v. Ellis (2015), was heard on appeal after a trial court found that unwanted communication critical of another person constituted “stalking” as defined by Georgia’s law. On appeal that was overturned, and the parallels between that case and Peters’ are striking:
”Matthew Chan has a website on which he and others publish commentary critical of [poet] Linda Ellis. … On his website, they have published nearly 2,000 posts about Ellis, many of which are mean-spirited, some of which are distasteful and crude, and some of which publicize information about Ellis that she would prefer not to be so public. At least one post is written in the style of an open letter to Ellis, referring to her in the second person, and threatening to publicize additional information about Ellis and her family if she continues to employ the practices of which Chan and the other commentators disapprove. It is undisputed that Chan never caused any of these posts to be delivered to Ellis or otherwise brought to her attention. But it also is undisputed that Chan anticipated that Ellis might see the commentary on his website, and he may have even intended that she see certain of the posts, including the open letter to her. Ellis eventually did learn of the posts, and she sued Chan for injunctive relief under the Georgia stalking law.”
The trial court entered a permanent injunction against Chan, directing him to delete all posts about Ellis from his website. Chan told the appeals court the evidence failed to show that the publication of posts about Ellis on his website amounted to the sort of “contact” forbidden by the law, and the appeals court agreed.
As written, Chan said most of the posts were addressed to the public, not to Ellis in particular, even if they were about Ellis, nor did Chan do anything to cause the posts to be delivered to Ellis or even brought to her attention, even if Chan anticipated Ellis might come across them.
Ellis learned of the posts, even if arguably communicated to her, only because of her choice to discover the content of the website, the appeals court found. “The evidence shows that Ellis visited the website herself … and that she had others visit the website and report back to her about the commentary published there.”
Georgia’s stalking law forbids speech only to the extent that it is directed to an unwilling listener, and even if Ellis did not like what she heard, she cannot be fairly characterized as an unwilling listener, the appeals court found.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Peters admitted he had posts from the AxaMonitor Facebook discussion group reported to him, and that he occasionally “post[s] on Facebook to correct the lies.”
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Find Us on Super Geeks
Join AxaMonitor editor Carlos Pedraza every week on the Super Geeks live podcast in the Real Super Geeks Facebook group every Friday at 8 p.m. PDT/11 p.m. EDT.
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