Supreme Court denies case backed by The Onion of Ohio man arrested after making satire
Kaelan Deese
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The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from an Ohio man who was arrested after creating a parody Facebook page in 2016 to make fun of his local police department, a case that garnered the attention of satirists at the Onion.
Anthony Novak was arrested after he created a spoof account for the Parma Police Department. He was indicted based on a state law that bans the use of a computer to disrupt police functions and was later acquitted by a jury.
Novak subsequently sued the police and the city, claiming his First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit sided with the police department in April 2022, saying it was entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that often protects police from liability over civil rights violations.
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Some of Novak’s spoofs for the account included posts for a fake “pedophile reform event” that mentioned how “successful participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become honorary members of the department after completing puzzles and quizzes.”
The police officers who arrested Novak, Kevin Riley and Thomas Connor, contended they had probable cause to arrest him because they sincerely believed his conduct disrupted their operations.
The case received widespread attention after the Chicago-based satirical outlet, The Onion, filed a legal brief in support of Novak while being tongue-in-cheek about the justices by referring to them as “total Latin dorks.”
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“As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists,” the outlet wrote in an amicus brief. “This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”
With the Supreme Court declining to take up the case, the federal appeals court ruling that threw out Novak’s lawsuit against the police department, citing qualified immunity, stands.