Tyrone Blackburn faced contempt and no-opposition sanctions as a federal judge buried him over fabricated remarks.
Fat Joe got another gift from the bench after a federal judge slammed Tyrone Blackburn and cleared the way for sanctions. The July 10 order reads less like a ruling and more like a career obituary.
Magistrate Judge Jennifer Willis granted Rock National’s motion to overrule Blackburn’s objection to its sanctions motion, meaning the motion is now unopposed and the ruling is pending. Roc Nation argued that his application was late, exceeded the word limit, and was filled with citations that gave rise to the illusion of artificial intelligence.
Blackburn cited language on 17 separate occasions that did not appear in the cases he cited, and he did not dispute this. He regarded the quotations as faithfully reflecting paraphrases of each point, calling them ordinary works of legal argument.
Judge Willis disagreed.
“This court is deeply troubled by (1) Blackburn’s use of quotation mark language in a case that cited language that did not exist; and (2) Blackburn’s insistence that his conduct was admissible because the case would exist even if the cited language did not exist,” she wrote, before adding his attacks on Locke State and his pattern of misrepresentations to the list.
Then she did something that few judges would mind. She pulled out a Webster’s dictionary, defined the words “quote” and “quotation mark” for him in the order, and then pointed him to the Blue Book’s rules for changing quoted text.
Courts view cited language as a promise that the language was indeed included in the case, and Willis has made clear that she does not take kindly to attorneys who renege on that promise.
His defensive tactics made the situation worse.
Blackburn fired back, blaming Roc Nation for 40 failed citations, while Willis personally checked each one.
“Rather than accept responsibility for the inaccurate statements in the opposition motion, Blackburn made baseless accusations against Roc Nation’s attorneys in an attempt to divert attention from himself,” Willis wrote.
Two days earlier, Willis had scorned and threatened him over an entirely separate stunt.
Blackburn’s motion to withdraw from the Terrence Dixon case included a transcript of a deposition, a sworn statement from an adult woman claiming that Fat Joe sexually abused her when she was 13 years old.
He placed Fat Joe on the public docket without notifying his attorneys or obtaining permission under a court protective order. Fat Joe’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, sprang into action, hammered the material and sealed it, and Willis sealed the entire docket entry the same day.
Fat Joe denies this and all other accusations, calling them an act of extortion and none of which have been proven.
Blackburn fired back a day later, saying the protective order only covered discovery material and not the statements of a woman who came forward on her own. He was opposed to sealing anything. Willis pointed out the irony because he recently filed a sanctions motion accusing Fat Joe’s team of leaking transcripts under the same order.
Anyone who has followed AllHipHop’s coverage of Blackburn has seen this before.
He is representing the Rev. Duane Youngblood against Bishop TD Jakes, who sued for defamation after Youngblood accused him of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1980s. Jacks denies all this and says Youngblood tried to extract $6 million from him before going public.
Blackburn’s brief in that case was filled with fabricated case law and non-existent citations.
U.S. District Judge William Stickman of the Western District of Pennsylvania did not hide his reaction. Stickman called that a clear violation of the Supreme Order’s ethics rules and denied the motion to dismiss with a brief answer on the record.
Jacks’ team said it spent more than 140 hours cleaning up the mess, which cost about $76,000. To act as a deterrent, Stickman was fined $5,000 and stripped of Blackburn’s status in the region.
It all hits him hard as he tries to move away from the Fat Joe case altogether. According to NBC News, Dixon initially sued “Fat Joe” for $20 million, then quietly dropped his most explosive accusation.
Blackburn’s written response to the contempt order is due on July 15.
