Karen#1
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[Justices Baker, Hoffstadt, and Moor]
This morning in Los Angeles, the civil lawsuit filed by Danny Masterson’s victims alleging years of harassment by the That ‘70s Show actor and the Church of Scientology will have an oral arguments hearing at the 2nd Appellate District court.
It’s the second time this lawsuit, initially filed in 2019, has been heard by this appeals court, and like last time the hearing will be streamed live online.
The court’s website says that it will provide a link to the stream “5 or 10 minutes” before the proceeding begins, which is scheduled to start at 9 am Pacific time (noon in New York, 5 pm in London).
The Bixler v. Scientology lawsuit is the fourth one being heard in the morning session, so there will be some time before it gets up to the plate.
An initial case is scheduled for 20 minutes of argument (Kohl v. Corrigan), a second case for 27 minutes (Lavine v. Rodiger), a third case for 30 minutes (Hurtado v. Jones) for a total of 77 minutes of allotted time. Add to that some time for rebuttal and breaks, and Bixler v. Scientology may not get started until around 10:30 am or 11 am?
A full 60 minutes is scheduled for Bixler: 30 minutes for the Jane Does, represented by their attorney Simon Leen, and then 30 minutes for Scientology.
The three justices from the district’s Division Five hearing the case are presiding justice Brian M. Hofstaddt and associate justices Lamar W. Baker and Carl H. Moor.
“It’s a pretty distinguished group for an intermediate state court appellate panel. A law clerk for Sandra Day O’Connor (Hofstaddt), a deputy White House counsel under Obama (Baker), and some really prestigious firms in private practice. All three are also former federal prosecutors, which you would think bodes well for the victims and poorly for their attorneys,” says our appellate attorney expert, TX Lawyer.
What he means by “poorly for their attorneys” is that the court has indicated that it will be considering monetary sanctions against the Boies Schiller firm and partner John Kucera for including bogus AI-generated case citations in a response brief.
AI blunders have become increasingly common in court in the last couple of years, but Boies Schiller is the first really prestigious national firm to get caught up in such a debacle, and we expect the legal press will be watching this hearing closely to see how hard the panel comes down on Kucera, who accepted blame for the errors.
Chrissie Carnell-Bixler and her fellow plaintiffs — her husband, rocker Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Bobette Riales, and two women going by Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 — are suing over the harassment they say they’ve experienced since the women came forward to the LAPD in 2016 with allegations that they had been raped by Scientology celebrity Masterson. The lawsuit is only about that campaign of harassment, and it was filed in August 2019.
Late in 2020, the first judge in the case ruled that the plaintiffs had no right to sue because, when they were Scientologists, they had signed contracts with clauses that obliged them to take all grievances to Scientology’s own internal brand of “religious arbitration.”
But in January 2022, this same 2nd Appellate District overturned that ruling, restoring the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Masterson had been charged criminally in 2020, and the civil lawsuit was put on hold during his criminal trials in 2022 and 2023.
Masterson was convicted of two counts of forcible rape on May 31, 2023, and he’s now serving 30 years to life in prison. When the civil lawsuit finally got a chance to get going again after his sentencing, Scientology filed an anti-SLAPP motion, trying to gut the case.
But their motion was denied by Judge Upinder Kalra, and so Scientology appealed that ruling.
In April 2025 Scientology filed its appeal brief. Then in late July attorneys for the plaintiffs from Boies Schiller filed their “respondents’ brief.” (In appeals court terms, Scientology here is the “appellant” and the Jane Does are the “respondents.”)
Scientology then got one more turn by filing an “appellant’s reply brief,” and made the accusation that there appeared to be AI-generated bogus case law citations in the respondents’ brief.
One thing we’ll be watching today is how much the AI errors affect the arguments that are being made by the plaintiffs. Scientology is trying to convince the court that people named as harassers in the lawsuit by the Jane Does as agents of the church actually have no connection with it, that any statements made about the Jane Does were part of a public debate and not private harassment, and that Judge Kalra exceeded his authority when he found that the Jane Does have, at this early stage, sufficiently alleged a conspiracy by the church.
As soon as we have a link for today’s stream, we’ll post it here.
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Today: Danny Masterson/Scientology civil suit heard at appellate court, streamed online
This morning in Los Angeles, the civil lawsuit filed by Danny Masterson’s victims alleging years of harassment by the That ‘70s Show actor and the Church of Scientology will have an oral arguments hearing at the 2nd Appellate District court.
tonyortega.substack.com
