Horse Racing and Free Speech: Bob Baffert’s Lawsuit Against Two Betters and the “libel-proof” doctrine
Bob Baffert, the embattled king of horse training, has spent the past two-plus years waging a legal war against some of the most powerful entities in his sport, fighting with limited success to overturn lengthy bans in the wake of cascading scandals involving flunked drug tests and horse deaths.
Last fall, though, Baffert trained his well-resourced legal machine on arguably lesser targets: a couple of obscure railbirds who had been chirping about him on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Baffert sued Justin Wunderler and Daniel DiCorcia, horse racing bettors with moderate followings on X, in September, alleging they had defamed and attempted to extort him. Baffert’s complaint, filed in federal court in San Diego, claimed that the two “collectively spearheaded a conspiracy theory” that Baffert engaged in illegal blood doping with his horses and that they attempted to blackmail Baffert by threatening to release an alleged damaging video.
But one of those “two schmoes,” as the man’s lawyer calls them, is fighting back.
DiCorcia’s attorney, Jeff Lewis, argued in a recent filing that Baffert, who is the most controversial figure in the sport thanks to drug violations and the deaths of top thoroughbreds in his care, is “libel-proof” because he already has such a poor reputation. Lewis called Baffert the “Lance Armstrong of horse racing,” comparing him to the blood-doping cyclist, and said his client was sued “for suggesting what the world already knows: that Baffert is notorious for doping and mistreating horses.”
In an interview, his first since being sued, DiCorcia, 43, said Baffert attempted to intimidate his critics by picking on two regular guys with little recourse. DiCorcia has peddled anti-Baffert and other horse racing T-shirts out of his car, and Wunderler lost thousands betting against a Baffert horse.
Source: Washington Post
