Posted on | October 1, 2025 | No Comments
Sometimes, you have to explain the set-up for a joke before it makes any sense to a general reader:
The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that features prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote animated shorts as a running gag. The company manufactures outlandish products that fail or backfire catastrophically at the worst possible times.
If you’re my age, you grew up watching Road Runner cartoons every Saturday morning, so the concept of ordering a product from the Acme mail-order catalog (and then suffering the disastrous consequences) is an obvious comic plot device. So, during the Brett Kimberlin saga, when the Pro Se Pipsqueak was filing peace orders and bogus lawsuits against various “enemies” (notably leading to Aaron Walker getting handcuffed during a Maryland court hearing), we began joking about Kimberlin — who had boasted of the number of lawsuits he’d filed as pro se litigant — as being an alumnus of The Acme Law School. At the time, the diminutive pipe-bomber was vocally supported by a clique of progressive blogger types who had a habit of offering ill-informed legal opinions about the various torts and crimes of which my friends and I were guilty, and we’d mockingly dismiss them as practitioners of Acme Law.
All that is preamble to recent legal news from California, where the pro se litigants Ariel and Maridol Mendones sued their former property management company Cushman and Wakefield over a tenant dispute. Acting as their own lawyers, the plaintiffs then manufactured fake “evidence” using artificial intelligence (AI):
The Court finds that Plaintiffs violated section 128.7(b) of the Code of Civil Procedure by submitting fabricated evidence in support of their motion for summary judgment….
The Court finds that exhibits 6A and 6C are products of GenAI and do not capture the actual speech and image of Geri Haas. In other words, these exhibits are deepfakes….
While the “person” depicted in exhibits 6A and 6C bears a passing resemblance to the person depicted in exhibit 36, they are not the same person. The accent, cadence, volume, word choice, pauses, gestures, and facial expression, among other characteristics, of the person depicted in exhibit 36 are vastly different from those demonstrated by the “persons” depicted in exhibits 6A and 6C….
The Court finds that a terminating sanction is appropriate. This sanction is proportional to the harm that Plaintiffs’ misuse of the Court’s processes has caused. A terminating sanction serves the appropriate remedial effect of denying Plaintiffs— and other litigants seeking to make use of GenAI to submit video testimonials—of the ability to further prosecute this action after violating the Court’s and the Defendants’ trust so egregiously.
Further, a terminating sanction serves the appropriate deterrent effect of showing the public that the Court has zero tolerance with attempting to pass deepfakes as evidence.
This sanction serves the appropriately chilling message to litigants appearing before this Court: Use GenAI in court with great caution.
(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) This is the most extreme pro se shenanigans I’ve ever seen, and I was sued by Brett Kimberlin, which makes me an expert on pro se shenanigans. Wile E. Coyote could not reached for comment.
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