Satirical Website ‘The Onion’ Files Supreme Court Brief Supporting Man Arrested for Police Parody Account

The U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington on Oct. 3, 2022. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

American satirical publication The Onion on Monday filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of an Ohio man who is suing his local police department for violating his First Amendment rights by arresting him over a satirical Facebook page.

Anthony Novak was arrested in 2016 after he launched a Facebook page that looked almost identical to that of the Parma, Ohio, Police Department’s official Facebook page.

Novak published six posts on the page in which he parodied the police department’s “questionable policing,“ according to his lawyers, including posts regarding the department’s ”heavy-handed tactics.”

The posts were an “obvious parody,” his lawyers said, and included one announcement of an “official stay inside and catch up with family day” to “reduce future crimes” from taking place in Ohio, during which anyone who was caught outside risked being arrested by police.

After just 12 hours, Anthony took down the Facebook page after a police spokesperson told a local TV station that an investigation would likely be launched into the page.

Novak was promptly arrested, his home was raided, and he was briefly jailed. He faced a felony charge relating to an Ohio law that prohibits any individual from using a “computer, computer system, computer network, telecommunications device, or other electronic device or system or the internet so as to disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any police, fire, educational, commercial, or governmental operations.”

A jury acquitted Novak at his trial, and he sued the department the following year, arguing the police violated his First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights (pdf).

But the lawsuit was dismissed after a federal appeals court in May granted the officers qualified immunity, a legal principle that protects state and local officials, including law enforcement officers, from being sued for allegedly violating an individual’s constitutional rights. This meant that Novak could not hold them accountable.

Novak’s lawyers have argued that the First Amendment protects the right of every American to criticize the government and its officials.

Serious Satire

Last week, Novak appealed the dismissal of his lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court, and The Onion has now weighed in on the matter in support of Novak.

In keeping with The Onion’s satirical style, the 23-page amicus brief (pdf) states that The Onion is “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history,” offering “highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events.”

The publication also enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion, according to the court document, and provides more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous “news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world.”

“Members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union,” the court document states. “On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.”

According to the court document, the publication filed the brief to “protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality.”

‘Justifiably Concerned’

“The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists,” it states. “This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”

While the contents of the amicus brief are delivered in satirical style, The Onion’s filing is most definitely not a joke.

The publication said it became “justifiably concerned” when it learned that Novak’s lawsuit was dismissed and the officers were granted qualified immunity and pointed out that its own business model was “threatened” by such actions.

It noted that The Onion “regularly pokes its finger in the eyes of repressive and authoritarian regimes, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, and domestic presidential administrations.”

“So The Onion’s professional parodists were less than enthralled to be confronted with a legal ruling that fails to hold government actors accountable for jailing and prosecuting a would-be humorist simply for making fun of them,” the company wrote in the court document.

“The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurdity,” they wrote.

The publication added in the brief that it “cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks.”

The Epoch Times has contacted The Onion for comment.