Prominent LA Eviction Lawyer Loses Defamation Trial Over Parody Twitter Account

One of L.A. County’s busiest tenant law firms prevailed this week when a jury ruled that a Twitter account crudely impersonating a prolific landlord-side lawyer did not constitute libel.

L.A. eviction attorney Dennis Block brought the case against the nonprofit law firm BASTA and its executive director, Daniel Bramzon.

The trial focused on whether the Twitter account @DennisPBlock — which labeled itself as a parody of Block’s real account @DennisBlock — defamed Block through its often vulgar and untrue posts mocking Block and other lawyers in his firm.

The jury reached a verdict Tuesday, concluding that no reasonable person would have considered the tweets to be true. According to the ruling, the account was merely parodying Block and his colleagues, not defaming them.

In an interview with LAist, Bramzon said that if the jury had awarded millions of dollars to Block, as requested by the plaintiffs’ attorney, it would have put BASTA out of business.

“This lawsuit was not about a Twitter account,” Bramzon said. “It was an obvious effort to shut down BASTA and eliminate one of L.A. County's fiercest tenant rights organizations.”

Block declined to comment on the verdict.

Bramzon and his firm have a reputation for being among L.A.’s most aggressive tenant defense firms, known for demanding jury trials in many eviction cases. A 2014 L.A. Weekly profile described him as someone “legendary" for his "courtroom swagger,” who loves to “trash-talk the opposition.”

Block has a similarly high-profile reputation in local eviction courtrooms, once bragging in a DVD that he handed to clients, according to the Los Angeles Times, that he “has evicted more tenants than any other human being on the planet Earth.”

LAist previously reported on sanctions against Block's firm over a recent court filing containing fake case law, an error legal experts attributed to likely misuse of a generative artificial intelligence program.

Bramzon said he did not create the Twitter account or write the posts himself. He said it was run by a former IT contractor for BASTA, Brett Schulte, who was originally named in the lawsuit but defaulted before the verdict.

Bramzon told LAist that Schulte ran the account on his own time, not at the behest of BASTA. Schulte declined an interview request.

The jury ruled that the account did not constitute libel, the written form of defamation. Notably, however, jurors also found that Bramzon “either directly or through an agent or employee, made or caused, authorized, directed, or solicited” the tweets to be made.

A sample of the tweets presented at trial, which LAist reviewed in the verdict forms, shows the account frequently descending into racially and sexually explicit language. What follows is a small selection of the tweets that were part of Block’s unsuccessful defamation lawsuit:

• “Dennis Block & Associates is helping to #MAGA by evicting one latino at a time!”
  
• “If you have tenants from countries that dear leader Trump has designated as ‘shithole countries’ we can help you evict them today!”
  
• “My associates are all either obese, disciplined by the bar, or cheap ‘people of color’ working against their own kind. Oh, or my idiot sons.”
  
• "When a Dennis Block attorney wins their first jury trial they get a Rolex. But on their first tenant suicide, they get a new car!"

The lawsuit claimed BASTA used the account with “malicious intent” to harm Block and his colleagues’ “reputations, credibility and livelihood.”

“Sometimes you go to a comedy show and you cringe because they do a really bad job,” Bramzon said. “Sometimes the comedians make fun of this group of people or that group of people or wives. This Twitter account was kind of doing something similar.”

Bramzon said after spending weeks caught up with the defamation trial, he’s relieved to again focus on tenant defense cases.

“Eviction defense work is needed now more than ever,” he said, pointing to this month’s expiration of COVID-19 projections in the city of L.A. and local eviction filing levels that now eclipse pre-pandemic evictions.

Most L.A. landlords go to eviction court with an attorney. But most tenants represent themselves, either because they can’t afford a lawyer or because they can’t secure pro-bono representation from one of the region’s few eviction defense attorneys.