Convicted criminal James O’Keefe is reportedly being sued by a former ACORN employee who was the reluctant star of one of O’Keefe’s videos. Earlier this year O’Keefe was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine for having trespassed the offices of a United States senator in Lousiana under false pretenses. He followed up that stunt with one wherein he fraudulently misrepresented himself to the Census Bureau in a pathetic scheme that not even Fox News would cover.
Now the ACORN escapade is coming back to bite him in his fat, petulant arse. Juan Carlos Vera was an employee in the San Diego office of ACORN. He was videotaped by O’Keefe allegedly offering advice on how to smuggle underage girls into the country for prostitution. At least that was the impression left by the videos that O’Keefe distributed to Fox News and other disreputable media shops like those of Andrew Breitbart, O’Keefe’s mentor.
As it turns out, the video was edited in a manner that deliberately misconstrued the actual events. Subsequent investigations proved that Vera had valiantly acquired as much information as he could extract from O’Keefe and immediately reported him to the police. But dishonest editing is not the only thing for which O’Keefe may be guilty.
Now Vera has filed suit against O’Keefe in federal court for violation of California’s privacy laws. In California it is illegal to make video or audio recordings without the consent of all of the participants. And wasn’t it generous of O’Keefe to provide the evidence of his own wrongdoing by making the videos public and bragging about his role in producing them?
Little Jimmy O’Keefe is proving himself to be an incorrigible delinquent. Although he considers himself to be a journalist, and he will remain a hero to the Tea Baggers, the reality is that he is nothing more than a cheap prankster, a recidivist lawbreaker, a partisan hack, and above all, an idiot. I suppose that’s what you get for attending the Borat School of Journalism.
