UNC Gave Racists $2.5 Million To Settle A Lawsuit That Hadn't Been Filed Yet, And The Racists Are Abusing The DMCA To Hide The Details

from the buckle-in dept

Last Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving, some very odd news broke about the University of North Carolina giving the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million and a bullshit confederate statue that had been torn down by protesters in 2018. The Sons of Confederate Veterans have a history of promoting racist ideas and movements, with a special focus on promoting Confederate monuments and symbols -- symbols of support for slavery from a bunch of literal traitors -- as well as promoting historical revisionism about the US Civil War. Contrary to the belief of some, those monuments -- including the one at UNC -- were put up many years after the Civil War, and were frequently put in place as a show of racist attitudes and beliefs, not as a historical remembrance. There's a reason so many places are choosing to take those down.

The NY Times story linked above had some oddities in it. It claims that UNC's Board of Governors agreed to hand the "Silent Sam" statue over to the group and give them $2.5 million, perhaps to build a museum to house the statue, to settle a lawsuit. But what lawsuit? And what possible standing could the Sons of Confederate Veterans have to sue over a statue it did not own and had no direct relationship with? There was one line that really stood out to me in the original story:

R. Kevin Stone, the commander of the Confederate group, said the settlement was fair. He said that his group was in possession of the statue at an “undisclosed location.”

He did not know specifically when his group had sued the university but said that negotiations had been going on for months.

The leader of the group doesn't know when they sued the University? Huh? It turns out that the same sentence caught the attention of tenacious lawyer, and producer of epic (and often impossible to follow) Twitter threads, Greg Doucette, who decided to investigate. Doucette discovered that the lawsuit was filed... Wednesday. Not some Wednesday in the past, but last Wednesday. The same day that the lawsuit was settled. And, even more insane? The UNC Board of Governors met an hour before they were served with the lawsuit to approve the settlement. That's... not how this is supposed to work. And then, UNC immediately filed an answer to the lawsuit, and then a settlement "consent judgment" was entered, and signed off on by the judge -- all on the day before Thanksgiving, all within a few hours. Oh, and as Doucette points out, the judge who signed off on the settlement, Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour, happens to be a UNC and UNC Law alum.

Doucette even points out that the University sent out a press release about the settlement before the lawsuit even existed. Which is... very, very odd.

Still, that's not usual Techdirt fare. What makes it worthy of Techdirt is what happened this week. Doucette has continued his digging (and continued to lengthen his Twitter thread). He went to the courthouse to scan all the court documents related to the lawsuit. He posted all of the documents to a Dropbox folder. Except, if you go to that link as I type this you see this:

What happened? The Sons of Confederate Veterans sent a bogus DMCA takedown notice to Dropbox, claiming that it violated their copyright. Their copyright on public court filings. I am assuming that Dropbox will get this sorted out fairly quickly, but all of this may make you wonder just why would such an organization file a completely bogus takedown notice to hide documents in their own damn lawsuit?

It seems what really, really pissed off the Sons of the Confederate Veterans was that Doucette had posted the "victory statement" which literally has the leader of this group giving away the entire game plan, including flat out admitting that they had no case at all, and everyone he spoke to agreed that any case would get thrown out of court:

As to option one, having the memorial restored to McCorkle Place at UNC, we have been trying for over a year to find a way to bring suit against UNC, the UNC Board of Trustees, and the UNC Board of Governors, and anyone personally, like Carol Folt, who could be held responsible. As we have mentioned dozens of times, despite consulting every known legal source, including those parties who have had success with SCV suits in Virginia and Tennessee, we could not get past the issue in North Carolina law of legal standing in the Silent Sam case so to bring a suit. Even if we had filed suit, our complaint would have been challenged and dismissed immediately without result. After extensive consultation (with judges, retired judges, etc.), we were 100% certain that this would be the outcome.

It also admits that the group and UNC had spent months negotiating this "deal" in secret, fearing that any media leak would torpedo the deal.

Prior to this point, we could not mention ANY of this to you at meetings or over the Tar Heel email list because all negotiations were required to be 100% confidential. For their part, knowledge by the media, the leftists, UNC faculty, and even other members of the Board not privy to the negotiations that their leadership was working with the SCV would have torpedoed the whole thing. On our part, with a minority of disgruntled and impatient members in our ranks, and those who have admitted that they gladly share information with our enemies, there was a very distinct risk that loose and uninformed talk would have ended the whole thing, and that nothing would be accomplished. A breach of this confidentiality would have killed the whole deal. This is why we could not share extensive details until now.

The statement also notes that it will reveal "more details than I will be giving the media and others," and boy does it ever. He more or less gloats over the fact that the University is literally paying them for this.

What we have accomplished is something that I never dreamed we could accomplish in a thousand years and all at the expense of the University itself. This is a major strategic victory, and I look forward to continuing to move the Division forward.

There's a lot more in the ongoing thread (as there always in Doucette's rather epic threads), but for the purposes of Techdirt, we'd just like to call out yet another example of how the DMCA is abused for censorship once again -- and how that sometimes backfires and helps draw a lot more attention to whatever it is that people are trying to hide (there's a name for that somewhere...).

What's truly hilarious about this whole thing is that, according to that "victory statement," part of the reason why UNC was so eager to do this deal was to... avoid bad publicity. That also explains why all of this went down the day before Thanksgiving. That strategy doesn't seem to be working out quite as intended, though.

Filed Under: censorship, confederate statues, copyright, dmca, north carolina, racists, silent sam, unc board of governors
Companies: sons of confederate veterans, unc