Surprise: Judge Recuses Himself From Elon Musk’s GARM SLAPP Suit

Elon Musk’s legal team probably thought they had the perfect strategy: file a SLAPP suit in a court with a judge known for partisan rulings, including rulings benefiting Elon himself in the past. But they didn’t count on one thing – the judge recusing himself.

Last week, Elon sued GARM and the others, claiming that it was an antitrust violation for them to organize a boycott against putting ads on Twitter. There was no evidence presented of any such boycott. Instead, there was evidence that GARM had recommended that advertisers be careful about how it might look if their brand ads appeared next to awful content.

However, we had worried that Elon filed it in the Wichita Falls division of the Northern District of Texas federal courts, knowing it was guaranteed to be assigned to Judge Reed O’Connor. O’Connor is known as a “go-to judge” for all sorts of partisan pro-GOP nonsense. And, Elon already has a case in front of him with his SLAPP suit against Media Matters.

In that case, O’Connor refused to toss it out early (when it obviously should have been). Just recently, Media Matters had requested that ExTwitter have to file an amended statement of interested parties, to indicate that Tesla is an interested party, noting that Judge O’Connor appears to own a significant number of Tesla shares. ExTwitter has insisted that Tesla is unrelated to the case while Media Matters has responded by pointing out how ridiculous that is. Judge O’Connor has not yet ruled on that issue in that case.

However, this morning, he announced that he was recusing himself from this new case and told the clerk to reassign it to another judge.

It’s unclear why (and we may never know the official reason, though how he rules on the Media Matters request may give us some clue).

That said, GARM has already announced that it was shutting down. It’s also possible that the case still gets assigned to a different terrible judge in Texas. Or that the 5th Circuit does what it normally does on appeals and ignores basically all legal history.

But, for a brief moment, Judge O’Connor has done the right thing and recused himself from a case in which the media was already highlighting the very real appearance of bias.

Update: As a few people have pointed out, it appears that O’Connor owns some Unilever stock, and that’s one of the defendants in the case, which could explain things.