According to a report in the North County Gazette newspaper, controversial violent video game lawyer Jack Thompson has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Southeastern Florida against the Florida Bar Association, claiming one million dollars in damages, based on what he claims are vindictive complaints filed against him by other lawyers, some representing game companies.
Thompson, who claims in the suit that he has "enjoyed tremendous success, litigatively and otherwise, against the makers of the hyperviolent cop-killing
Grand Theft Auto video games", most recently
removed himself from the Alabama-based
GTA murder lawsuit, claiming that "I didn’t want [the judge] to have my personality and my presence in the case in any way effect the survivability and the merits of the case." That case is
currently proceeding to trial.
In this Florida instance, Thompson claims in his suit that: "The Florida Bar has hectored plaintiff Thompson for 19 months with SLAPP Bar complaints filed by opposing counsel (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participants). Continually, during that time, Thompson and his counsel in these Bar matters have repeatedly asked The Florida Bar to sit down with him and his counsel to try to resolve, once and for all, this dispute, which goes back more than 18 years when other baseless SLAPP Bar complaints were filed, resulting in the payment of money damages to plaintiff Thompson."
Thompson also notes that it is particularly video game lawyers such as Blank Rome, which represents
GTA creator Take-Two, that he believes are targeting him, following trouble with the Florida Bar association in the early 1990s, commenting: "Bar never got over this defeat and is now at it again, at the behest of some of the same lawyers on behalf of some of the same broadcasters, as well as also at the behest of the violent video game industry, the makers of the
Grand Theft Auto games, and their lobbyist/lawyers."
