When we’re talking about modern Satanism, it’s almost unavoidable to also talk about The Satanic Temple (TST), since it’s arguably the largest Satanic organization in the world. And there’s one thing in regards to The Satanic Temple that I wanted to talk about for quite some time now: The Temple’s lawsuit against four former members.
Now, what I’m going to say about this issue is certainly going to ruffle some feathers in the Satanic community, so let me make a couple of things clear, before we move forward:
What I have to say about this lawsuit is in no way a commentary on any of the statements that these four ex-members made about The Satanic Temple, nor is it a commentary on their behavior towards the Temple and its members.
I also want to make clear that what I know about the American legal system stems mostly from Law & Order, so take what i say with a grain of salt and if anyone happens to know more about this than I do, feel free to correct me on the things that I got wrong.
For those of you, who don’t know; here’s a quick summery of what happened:
In early 2020, there was some drama going on within the Temple’s Washington chapter. I don’t know what exactly was going on and it’s not important for now, but whatever it was, it left David Johnson, at the time a member of the TST WA leadership, feeling so let down by the organization that he used his admin access to the chapter’s official Facebook page to remove all the other admins and to add three other TST WA members as admins. These four had full control over the page now, and filled it with anti-TST content.
These four people are now running multiple social media accounts, where the go by the name Evergreen Memes For The Queer Satanic Fiends or short QueerSatanic, usually posting anti-TST stuff.
In April 2020, TST filed a Complaint against QueerSatanic and claimed computer fraud, cyberpiracy, interference with business expectancy, violation of the Consumer Protection Act and defamation; in other words: TST accused QueerSatanic of hacking their Facebook page and using it to spread lies about the Temple.
The initial Complaint got dismissed in 2021, TST filed two Amended Complaints later that year and the whole thing is still going on.
For a considerable time, I was completely on The Satanic Temple’s side with this and the reason was primarily what was said in the Court’s dismissal of the initial Complaint in February 2021:
“This claim fails for one reason. The ‘domain in question’ is not in fact ‘facebook.com/TheSatanicTempleWashington.’ The ‘domain name’ is ‘facebook.com.’ And The Satanic Temple does not claim to own it. It’s trade-mark lies in the post-domain path, which does not constitute a ‘domain name’ under the ACPA. As explained above, the statute defines the term ‘domain name,’ and the case law provides further clarification. The Satanic Temple’s claim fails under both.”
To me this statement displayed a very outdated understanding of how the internet works. In times where social media are more important than ever before, the ownership of an actual domain becomes less and less relevant. Would it be legal for anyone to hijack Satanic Europe, simply because I’m not the owner of wordpress.com? Granted, my blog has its own domain, but what about all those blogs that don’t? This can’t be just!
If anything this dismissal proved a major flaw in how American laws handle the internet, rather than QueerSatanic’s innocence.
Now, what I didn’t realise at the time was that I was committing a logical fallacy. Since I thought that the Court’s reasoning was complete horseshit (which I also no longer believe, but more on that later), I concluded that therefore The Satanic Temple was in the right. Of course, that’s not necessarily the case.
That realisation came to me when a former TST WA member mentioned on Twitter that Facebook’s own help center says:
“Keep in mind that once you made someone an admin, they’ll be able to remove members or admins, add new admins and edit the group description and settings.”
I didn’t bother to double-check if Facebook’s help center really says this, but it doesn’t particularly matter, anyway. The important thing here is: TST voluntarily gave Johnson admin access to their Facebook page!
The Satanic Temple claims that their page was hacked, but merely using an account that you were granted access to is not hacking, even if you’re doing it in a manner that you were not permitted.
It’s also questionable, if it’s even the case that the defendants exceeded their authorised access to TST’s Facebook page. This would require their level of authorisation to be outlined in a contract, but if such a contract existed, one would expect that TST would claim breach of contract in their complaint or at the very least bring the contract up in court. Neither of which has happened, to the best of my knowledge.
The only thing that TST’s Complaint mentions, which comes close to a contract, is TST WA’s Membership Agreement and Code of Conduct, but this document is just a general membership agreement that apparently all TST WA members signed and which does not make any references to the defendants and their permissions and duties within TST.
While doing my homework in preparation for this article, I came to the realisation that I had made a mistake when i first reviewed the dismissal of the initial Complaint. I initially thought, this was the Court’s response to TST’s computer fraud claim, which is not the case. It was the Court’s response to TST’s cyberpiracy claim, in which they argued that the defendants are violating their trademark. The Court was of the opinion that the appearance of a trademark in a Vanity URL like that of a Facebook page is not in and of itself a trademark violation, which makes total sense.
All things considered, neither the computer fraud claim nor the cyberpiracy claim seem to hold water, which is why I now honestly believe that the Court was right to dismiss them. I know that some people will get angry at me, for saying this, but I don’t know what to tell you, it’s my honest opinion.
Out of all the claims in TST’s initial Complaint, the defamation claim is the only one that was dismissed with prejudice, which apparently means that it can’t be re-pled. The Court said:
“To determine whether Defendants’ statements were defamatory, the Court or jury must inevitably determine that the statements are false. […] That would require the Court or jury to define the beliefs held by The Satanic Temple and to determine that ablism, misogyny, racism, fascism, and transphobia fall outside those beliefs. That the Court cannot do without violating the First Amendment.”
I’m not sure that I completely understand what that means, but people who know more about American laws than I do, told me that it essentially boils down to: Opinions regarding somebody’s beliefs and/or political affiliations fall under free speech and are therefore not defamatory.
There’s an argument to be made that calling someone a Nazi without sufficient evidence should be considered defamatory, since such a claim can sincerely damage someone’s reputation, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Now, with all this boring stuff out of the way, let’s talk a bit about TST’s Amended Complaints, because this is where it gets really interesting.
At some point TST regained control of their chapter’s Facebook page, which they acknowledged in their first Amended Complaint, but for some reason they still reaffirmed their demand for injunctive relief regarding this page in their second Amended Complaint, claiming that this would be necessary to prevent the defendants from future attempts to regain access to the page, even though there was no sufficient evidence that the defendants had any interest in that.
The second Amended Complaint also included a demand that the defendants turn over control of a second Facebook page (a so-called “Allies” page, whatever that is), even though there doesn’t seem to be any record of TST ever requesting that prior to this Complaint.
The second Amended Complaint also included a modified version of their initial computer fraud claim. This time, TST alleged that the defendants were attempting to diminish donations to TST and to divert donations to a competitor organization that violates TST’s property rights. This claim was based on a Facebook chat in which someone (who wasn’t even one of the defendants, as far as I know) suggested to found – wait for it – The Satanic Temple 2: Electric Boogaloo. I swear, I’m not making this up!
Needless to say that the Temple did not provide any sufficient evidence that the defendants actually planned to found a competitor organization with that name, and it actually feels kinda silly to even point that out.
Ridiculous claims like these suggest that this lawsuit is in fact a SLAPP. For those who don’t know, SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, which is a lawsuit with the sole purpose of silencing critics. In America, everyone who’s involved in a lawsuit has to cover their own legal fees and in a SLAPP, the (usually wealthy) plaintiff uses this to their advantage. The plaintiff doesn’t expect to win, but rather tries to force the defendant into compliance by burdening them with the cost of legal defense. The plaintiff’s goal is accomplished when the defendant succumbs to the mounting legal costs and abandons their criticism.
Now, I’m of the opinion that just because a claim does not hold up in court, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole thing is a SLAPP. A plaintiff may very well believe in the rightfulness of their Complaint, even if the Court disagrees. However, it certainly doesn’t look good, when The Satanic Temple files Amended Complaints where they demand an injunctive relief that was already obsolete, demand things that they previously didn’t seem to care about and present a random reference to a 40 year old movie as “evidence” for trademark infringement.
It also doesn’t help that TST’s lawyer Matt Kezhaya publicly admitted that he had expected the defendants to eventually comply for financial reasons.
As I said earlier, this article is not meant to be a commentary on the numerous accusations that the defendants make against The Satanic Temple under their online moniker QueerSatanic. Personally, I find many of their claims to be over-exaggerated at best, which is why I fully understand that TST members are generally not very fond of QueerSatanic. Some TST members even have brought forward accusations against QueerSatanic, including harassment and doxxing.
But even if you think that QueerSatanic’s claims about the Temple are unreasonable (which I agree with) and even if the accusations against them are true (which they might be, for all I know); is a frivolous lawsuit really the appropriate response? Is this really what you consider to be the ongoing struggle for justice?
Well, maybe you do. After all, hijacking someone’s social media account that you were trusted with is arguably a dick move. This, combined with the intellectual dishonesty that they display in many of their TST-related articles and the harassment accusations may make you think that QueerSatanic fully deserve any and all actions that TST is taking against them. And for now, I’m not going to argue with that, because there is another, not completely unrelated issue that I want to talk about.
Recently, TST co-founder Lucien Greaves did an interview with Metal Blast, in which they talked about Greaves’ free speech absolutism (which, by the way, led TST to support Christian nationalists in court, presumably using donation money). Greaves defended his position, arguing that free speech restrictions such as hate speech laws would eventually lead to blasphemy laws.
As an example of this, they brought up a 2009 case of an Austrian lecturer who called the Islamic prophet Mohammed a pedophile during a seminar on the basics of Islam. She was referring to Mohammed’s third wife Aisha, who was six years old, when they married. This marriage was a political maneuver and absolutely nothing unusual at the time. The lecturer ignored this historical context entirely and instead claimed that Mohammed “just enjoyed sex with children.”
She certainly knew that putting it this way would cause outrage, which is presumably the reason why she did it. Therefore she was convicted of hate speech in 2011. In 2018 the European Court of Human Rights confirmed the sentence.
Greaves and his interview partner expressed the opinion that despite the lecturer’s deliberately offensive wording, it was an objective truth that Mohammed had an underage wife and therefore it should fall under free speech to call him a pedophile. Remember this! It’s going to become important in about a minute.
Not too long ago, The Satanic Housewife uploaded a video on TikTok, were she claimed that Lucien Greaves admitted in court that he was using donation money to fill his own pockets. Of course, this is an intentionally misleading exaggeration of what Lucien actually said during the examination that she referred to. It is, however, objectively true that he occasionally receives money from TST’s general fund (about 2000 bucks every four or five months, but no regular salary, according to Lucien’s testimony). Therefore – according to Lucien’s own reasoning – The Satanic Housewife’s statement falls under free speech, regardless of her misleading way of putting it.
And yet, what did TST do? They threatened her with a lawsuit!
Matt Kezhaya sent her a Demand Letter in which he requested that she published “a sufficient correction, clarification, or retraction of the defamatory statements,” or else TST would sue her. Allegedly, he also doxxed her.
It is already outrageous enough that TST is apparently willing to sue someone over a fucking TikTok video, but this also highlights an astonishing level of hypocrisy. Apparently, The Satanic Temple is willing to defend the free speech of Christian nationalists and islamophobes, because “hate speech laws lead to blasphemy laws,” but it doesn’t seem like this sort of free speech absolutism includes people who are critical of the Temple.
To be fair, The Satanic Housewife did not just claim that Lucien is misappropriating funds. She made several other claims that The Satanic Temple considers defamatory:
She claimed that TST is suing former members to silence them (but calling that defamation is ridiculous, regardless of whether it’s true or not).
She mentioned that a TST chapter head was accused of sexual assault (but made no claim whether the accusations were true or not).
She also mentioned that Greg “Penemue” Stevens, TST’s head of ministry was friends with far-right “ex-homosexual” Milo Yiannapoulos, which is demonstrably true!
In his Demand Letter, Matt Kezhaya claims that Penemue used to be friends with Yiannapoulos, but no longer is. And because Kezhaya has decided that they’re no longer friends, it’s defamatory to say otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong. It may very well be true, that these two are no longer friends, but their friendship isn’t the issue here. The issue is that The Satanic Temple, in all seriousness, makes the argument that any statement that is in conflict with that which they have determined to be The Truth™ constitutes an act of defamation, as if it was somehow illegal not to believe what they tell you.
With their lawsuit against QueerSatanic, I have often heard the justification that it’s not QueerSatanic’s criticism that they have a problem with. It’s that they hijacked TST’s social media accounts to spread their message.
They can’t use that excuse in regards to The Satanic Housewife, though. Here we have a person who published her criticism on her own social media accounts and still gets threatened with legal action.
More than once, I’ve heard people who are hostile towards the Temple compare it to Scientology. And while I still don’t think this comparison is fair, I can’t deny that I see where they’re coming from. After all, Scientology is also known for attempting to silence their critics by abusing the legal system and it seems like TST is doing the exact same thing.
I still have hope that The Satanic Temple will eventually remember that the freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend, even when they are on the receiving end of the offense, but to be honest; that hope has already started to fade.
Satanic Europe 
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