I wrote about the lawsuit and the huge controversy surrounding it here, so I won't be repeating that. If you need context, please read that blog post first.
One thing that irritates me, although it's by no means surprising, is how quick people are to jump to extreme conclusions, based on nothing more than hearsay and small tidbits of information.
The vast majority of people who were following the lawsuit situation were under the impression that Mitchell had sued Jobst for claiming that Mitchell had cheated his famous Donkey Kong scores. In other words, that the defamation claim was that Jobst had knowingly and falsely accused Mitchell to be a video game cheater.
That is absolutely true. I mean, the fact that the vast, vast majority of people who were following the situation thought that. I myself also thought that, the entire time.
It is also a fact that it turns out the lawsuit that went to trial and which Jobst lost (at least as of writing this) actually had nothing to do with the cheated scores. Instead, it had everything to do with Jobst having hinted that Apollo Legend committed suicide as a direct consequence of Mitchell having sued him (with the case having been settled out of court.) This is what the lawsuit was about, and it was what the judge ruled.
This entire situation is really ugly. However, the fallout has been even uglier. Although, of course, that isn't very surprising. Very much to be expected.
The main problem is that a lot of people are very quick to jump to conclusions based on merely those few tidbits of information. Many are accusing Jobst of having deliberately misled his audience in order to boost his crowdfunding campaign for the lawsuit. Many, many people are outright saying that Jobst is nothing but a fraudster who deliberately lied to his audience for monetary gain.
While this kind of counter-reaction is understandable, it's very rushed, and based on way too little information. Most of these people are not researching every single detail of what happened, going through all the videos and posts that Jobst made about it, examining what he actually said and claimed. And moreover, they apparently are either completely dismissive of, or outright haven't even watched, the video that Jobst recently uploaded explaining the situation.
Granted, that video is a bit long-winded and a bit confusing, and there's a lot to unpack there, but even without that video, I don't think it's a good idea to just rush to extreme conclusions (in either direction), based on too little information. I think the situation is much more nuanced than that.
While I myself have not done a huge amount of research on this subject either, I don't think that Jobst deliberately misled people in order to get financial benefits (or for any other reason for that matter). He might have acted very foolishly in making all those videos about the lawsuit while it was ongoing, and in retrospect he should have been much more cautious with them, but I'm not convinced that he made them with the explicit and conscious intent to mislead and defraud his viewers.
He himself explains a bit about why he made all those videos talking about all the evidence for Mitchell having cheated his scores. In retrospect he shouldn't really have made those videos, but I don't think he was being intentionally deceitful and fraudulent. The videos certainly didn't help his case, and ended up backfiring big time in terms of his reputation (and it doesn't exactly help that he, according to his own words, very intentionally and deliberately didn't consult his lawyer before making and publishing those videos), but I don't see malicious intent in them, an intent to defraud his viewers out of their money.
I suspect that what happened is that Jobst wanted the case to be about the cheated scores, he thought that he could somehow veer the case towards his side by piling up all the evidence against Mitchell's deceitful character, and thus created this kind of "campaign" against him in the form of several video essays, without consulting his lawyer (deliberately and intentionally) about whether that's a good idea or not. Perhaps, he was kind of trying to create his own case against Mitchell, all by himself, ignoring any advice from his lawyer. (I have no idea how much his lawyer was involved in all of this.)
He might have made a mistake, and he might have been a bit too arrogant, but I don't think he was intentionally deceitful towards his viewers, intentionally lying to them, in order to defraud them of their money.
Comments
Post a Comment