From the Wisconsin State Journal: A spate of hoax lawsuits filed late last month in federal courts
around the country — including Madison — against former Penn State
assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky appears to have been the work of
a serial litigant who has filed thousands of specious federal lawsuits.
And U.S. District Judge William Conley is not amused.
"Even
aside from the incredibly tasteless act of filing these false
accusations in light of the very real victims of sexual assaults against
children, the individual involved here appears to have committed a
fraud on this court," Conley wrote in an order issued Friday.
The
lawsuit is believed to be the work of Jonathan Lee Riches, Conley wrote.
Purporting to be "Jonathan Bollinger," a cousin to former UW
quarterback Brooks Bollinger, he claimed in a lawsuit filed June 28 in
U.S. District Court in Madison that Sandusky had molested him at Camp
Randall Stadium during a football game. The lawsuit sought a restraining
order to keep Sandusky away from him — no tall order considering
Sandusky, found guilty on June 22 of 45 counts of child sexual abuse,
will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
It was one of
about a dozen lawsuits filed in federal courts across the U.S. against
Sandusky under fictitious names and using fictitious addresses. In the
case filed in Madison, the address for "Jonathan Bollinger" was that of a
comedy club in Philadelphia. Another lawsuit, filed in Indiana, used
the address of a Chuck E. Cheese in Philadelphia.
Riches, Conley
wrote, "has vexed the court system with thousands of frivolous lawsuits
before his recent release from federal prison." His "recalcitrant zeal
for filing meretricious actions against newsmakers, celebrities,
athletes and politicians continues unabated," Conley wrote.
Among
the more than 2,600 lawsuits he has filed since 2006, according to media
reports over the years, were suits against the Kardashian sisters,
Michael Vick, Perez Hilton, Martha Stewart, even "the Somali pirates."
He also sued the Guinness Book of World Records from prison in 2009,
objecting to purportedly being described as the "most litigious man in
America" although neither the 2010 edition nor the current edition of
the book contains that category.
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