Legal battle for the ages to unfold this morning at the Danny Masterson retrial
OK, so it’s not the legal battle for the ages, but we are looking forward to this morning’s session at the Danny Masterson retrial when we will be dealing with our second subpoena in the case.
We were subpoenaed in 2021 by Masterson’s previous defense attorney, Tom Mesereau. And we were represented in court by the Underground Bunker’s attorney Scott Pilutik, who did a bang-up job and convinced Judge Charlaine Olmedo to quash Masterson’s attempt to get his hands on our records.
This time, Masterson’s current legal team, attorneys Philip Cohen and Shawn Holley, are trying to get us on the witness stand and so we have turned to Scott once again.
We thought you’d like to see the letter that he quickly put together for us last night. We think it’s a winner…
We hope that does the trick and keeps us out of the witness chair. (And we heard yesterday that this whole mess may be averted simply by the two parties stipulating to accept an article we wrote in 2021 in order to leave us out of it entirely.)
We do, however, want to address some strange attacks that came our way online yesterday.
It’s coming from the same parties who, for some reason, accused us of “secretly taping” Lisa Marie Presley in our 2015 interview of her that we published in January. We don’t know where this notion came from, but we don’t audiotape phone interviews, and we didn’t record our lengthy conversations with Presley.
She was well aware that we were taking notes during our phone calls, and she didn’t have any problem with it. (She was actually a longtime reader of the Underground Bunker and understood that she was talking to a reporter.) It’s our custom, during phone interviews, to take voluminous notes on a laptop, just like we do in court.
Now we’re being accused once again of “secretly taping” an interview subject, this time a trial witness for a 2021 article at the Underground Bunker, a strange echo of that previous accusation.
Again, we don’t tape phone interviews, and certainly not without the other person’s knowledge. We just type out notes. We type fairly fast, after all.
We really prefer not to address the online attacks aimed our way, and we’ll do our best to ignore them in the future.
As for this morning’s mother of all court battles, expect our usual lengthy reports to hit your inboxes later!
Want to help?
You can support the Underground Bunker with a Paypal contribution to bunkerfund@tonyortega.org, an account administered by the Bunker’s attorney, Scott Pilutik. And by request, this is our Venmo link, and for Zelle, please use (tonyo94 AT gmail).
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Tony, Please address what Katherine J tesified to, that you didn't have her consent to publish the article. You also wouldn't take it down after she asked you too. In this post you just addressed the "recording" aspect of the calls. You violated a rape survivors' consent regarding their story, and I find that deeply troubling.
Im Team Tony, but you need to address this because it sounds pretty fucked up.
It is really odd that parties facing a harassment suit would increase their harassment rather than go silent but then again, it is scientology “scripture” to harass. Masterson is at trial here, but the more scientology inserts itself in the trial, the more it becomes apparent that the reason these girls couldn’t report is because scientology wouldn’t back off. These distractions, if the jury gets to know about any of them, really point the finger directly at Masterson.
Scientology just can’t help itself, can it? Delay the trial at all costs then delay the trial while it’s happening. Olmedo does not seem to be the type to have patience with these distractions. Sanctions anyone?