Billy Mitchell became famous for, allegedly, making a high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong in 1982 (as well as several other games), and becoming featured in several events such as some kind of Nintendo award event, as well as the (somewhat controversial) documentary King of Kong that focuses largely on him and his achievements in the 1980's and since. He has also been a regular in many gaming conferences and events as a speaker.
He has also become infamous because of quite strong evidence that his scores were not legit, cheated in some manner. Most notably, his scores were removed from the video game high scores platform Twin Galaxies (which for a time was the largest and most reputable such platform, even used as an official source by the Guinness Book of Records.) Even more notably, Mitchell sued Twin Galaxies because of this, which was eventually ended with an out-of-court settlement with agreed compromises (Twin Galaxies restored his scores in some kind of "historical archive" page, although they are still not official scores.)
In fact, Mitchell became quite notorious for being so sue-happy against people who criticized him. He started threatening lawsuits left and right, and in some cases filed actual lawsuits. Besides the Twin Galaxies one, the most famous is his lawsuit against the youtuber and speedrunner who was known as Apollo Legend. This lawsuit, too, was settled out of court, with Apollo removing all of his youtube videos about Mitchell.
Sadly, Apollo Legend took his own life some time after this. Unsurprisingly, there was (and still is) a lot of speculation about the reasons for this, and whether the lawsuit had anything to do with it.
Mitchell became more and more of a target of videos that mocked him and accused him of cheating and being so sue-happy.
The latest famous lawsuit was against another youtuber, Karl Jobst, who is a speedrunner and makes videos mostly about speedrunning. He had also made several videos about Mitchell and his cheated speedrun scores, the Twin Galaxies incident, and so on.
During the entire lawsuit Jobst made several videos about it, showing all the evidence that exists against Mitchell's scores being legit, showing clips of Mitchell's depositions and so on. (Depositions are out-of-court interviews where the lawyers get to ask questions and sworn testimony from the opposing party. While these are official record, and a court reporter is always present, a judge might or might not be present.) Many of these clips showed Mitchell being asked about his alleged high scores and details about them, their setup, the hardware, and so on.
I'm not completely sure if Jobst directly claimed it in his videos, but at a very minimum he gave the extremely strong impression to his viewers that Mitchell's defamation lawsuit against him was about his claims about Mitchell having cheated his Donkey Kong high scores. He went on and on about these questions presented to Mitchell about the high scores, and he repeatedly explained all the strong evidence for them having been cheated in some manner, and overall talked in a manner that sounded like this entire lawsuit was about the cheating allegations, about how Mitchell was claiming that it was these cheating allegations by Jobst that had harmed his reputation. Jobst made it clear that he was not going to settle and that he will see the lawsuit to the end, precisely because of the extremely strong evidence. The tone of the videos was that it was pretty much a slam dunk case.
Turns out, that was not at all what the lawsuit was about.
Turns out that Mitchell's lawsuit was about Jobst's allegations that Mitchell's actions had directly caused Apollo Legend to commit suicide, which he had made in at least one video. The lawsuit was about these allegations being unsubstantiated and defamatory.
It also turned out that the court sided with Mitchell on this, and agreed that those allegations were defamatory. In other words, Karl Jobst lost the lawsuit.
Karl Jobst was an extremely liked and popular youtuber and speedrunner, and a huge amount of people were rooting for him. In fact, most of his fans were expressing that even if he were to lose the lawsuit (which they thought was about the cheating allegations), perhaps because of some technicality or Mitchell's lawyers being sleazier than Jobst's, they would still support him and consider him at least the moral victor.
Most of them became understandably stunned and disappointed when they found out that the lawsuit actually wasn't about the cheating allegations, and it was always about the Apollo Legend incident and Jobst's allegations about that. Jobst never made this clear in his videos, and he essentially misled all of his viewers. He even got a huge amount of donations for the lawsuit, no doubt the donors being in the belief that it was about the cheating allegations.
It's too early to know what this will do to Jobst's reputation, but it's probably safe to say that it will not be untarnished. Misleading all of his viewers in this way...
What makes this entire thing even uglier is that Billy Mitchell being so sue-happy is likely only getting emboldened and bolstered by this victory, and will keep bullying his critics with threats of lawsuits for the foreseeable future, intimidating them into silence because of all these legal precedents.
If Jobst had been completely honest and straightforward from the very beginning, and perhaps settled out of court (making it clear what the lawsuit was actually about), it might not have been so emboldening for Mitchell and, most importantly, would not have tarnished Jobst's reputation.
There is the small possibility that Karl Jobst was himself confused about what the lawsuit was about. In other words, rather than intentionally mislead his viewers, perhaps he just misunderstood what it was all about and made the videos genuinely rather than deceitfully. Either way, it doesn't really matter: His reputation is going to take a hit either way (especially since even if he were to claim that he was confused, many will not believe him. Or at a minimum will still blame him for not being diligent enough and causing so much confusion and donations given with the wrong impressions.)
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