Richart Ruddie Settles anti-SLAPP Claims, Makes Restitution; but the Guilty Companies Remain Unpunished

by Paul Alan Levy

Over the past few months, I have reported, to some extent jointly with Eugene Volokh, on a purportedly pro se lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island. Brought against a fictional defendant and submitted with a forged proposed consent order, the proceeding resulted in the issuance of a consent order calling for web pages on the Get Out of Debt Guy web site to be removed from the search engine databases at Google and other search engines. The blogger victimized by this scam has now entered into a non-confidential settlement agreement with Richart Ruddie, the online operative who was most directly responsible for committing this fraud on the court. Ruddie agreed to pay $71,000 make the blogger whole for his losses as well as paying counsel fees for Public Citizen and the various local counsel the blogger had to employ; Ruddie has also agreed to take actions, at his own expense, to get several court orders that he obtained fraudulently on behalf of two debt relief company customers, Rescue One Financial LLC and Financial Rescue LLC, lifted. Ruddie and Myvesta Foundation, which hosts the blog, have agreed to a proposed order under which the federal court would retain jurisdiction if necessary to enforce the order. Ruddie is in the final stages of plea bargaining with the United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island; we understand that his obligations will extend to getting phony consent orders lifted in two dozen other cases besides those involving Myvesta.

The one part of the fraud that remains unremedied is that the real culprits in this scheme – the debt relief companies as well as Bradley Smith, in whose name some of the fraudulent cases were filed - remain unpunished. My investigation of this scheme, which was reinforced by my ability to issue third-party subpoenas, persuaded me that the customers were equally guilty of the fraud. In the remainder of this blog post I explain how the settlement with Ruddie came to be concluded without the opportunity to force the companies as well as Smith himself to take public responsibility for the frauds that they hired Ruddie to commit. I will also suggest some ways in which this gap might be filled.