Today, my co-counsel Greg Adler and I filed suit against Fox, Newsmax, Univision, Timcast, Steven Crowder, Owen Shroyer, Simon Ateba, and Hollywood Unlocked for falsely portraying our innocent client as a neo-Nazi mass shooter. 
On May 6, 2023, an individual began shooting visitors to the Allen Premium Outlets, a large outdoor mall in Allen, Texas. In a matter of minutes, five adults and three children were killed, and seven other victims were wounded.
The shooter was 33-year-old Mauricio Martinez Garcia, a far-right extremist. Garcia's extensive online writings adopted white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and "incel" ideologies.
Garcia committed the massacre while wearing a tactical vest embroidered with a "RWDS" ("Right Wing Death Squad") patch. Garcia’s body was tattooed with Nazi symbols including SS lightning bolts and a large swastika.
On the day of the shooting, no details were released about the shooter, but on the following day, media organizations tried to identify the shooter based on the release of his name and date of birth by law enforcement.
The lawsuit alleges these defendants ignored basic journalistic precautions, and as a result, they accused the wrong person - our client, 36-year-old Mauricio Garcia, who is not the shooter and does not share the shooter’s date of birth.
The first defendant is Fox News. The suit alleges that an article on the Fox News website recklessly featured an image of my client, innocent 36-year-old Mauricio Garcia, identifying him as the shooter.
There was no justifiable reason to use my client’s image as the shooter. The suit alleges that Fox News failed to exercise reasonable care in verifying the accuracy of the photograph.
The second defendant is Owen Shroyer, host of the “War Room,” who broadcast an image of our client on his show, falsely identifying him as the shooter.
Shroyer is well known for his guilty plea to federal criminal charges relating to his breach of restricted areas while leading a crowd of rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Shroyer is also well known for his role in the 2022 defamation trial in Heslin v. Jones, which centered on his maliciously false statements about a Sandy Hook parent.
Shroyer works with Kit Daniels, who was sued in a nearly identical defamation case my firm brought in 2018 due to Daniels falsely identifying an innocent man as the Parkland High School mass shooter.
The third defendant is Hollywood Unlocked, LLC. The company runs Hollywood Unlocked, a news and entertainment content platform owned by media entrepreneur Jason Lee and backed by venture capital.
On its website, Hollywood Unlocked published an article portraying our client as the shooter, acting in reckless disregard of basic journalistic precautions.
The next defendants are Simon Ateba and his media outlet Todays New Africa. Ateba briefly attended White House press events, where he has gained notoriety for his bizarre confrontations with White House press officials.
Ateba repeatedly published articles featuring images of my client as the shooter. Again, there was no justifiable basis to use my client’s photograph.
The next defendant is Newsmax. Two of Newsmax’s primetime shows, The Balance with Eric Bolling and Greg Kelly Reports, featured extended segments focusing on my client as the mass murderer.
Newsmax tried to use our client’s appearance to deny the crime was motivated by neo-Nazism. Our client Mauricio is a proud Chicano, and he has classic Dallas lowrider style.
For those unaware, Chicano is an identity term for Mexican Americans who have a non-Anglo self-image, embracing their Mexican Native ancestry.
Our client Mauricio has a front-fringed “Edgar cut,” sometimes called a “Mexican Caesar,” and he has the name of his longtime girlfriend tattooed in gothic script on his lower neck.
As the LA Times noted last year, “The Edgar belongs to a history of anti-assimilationist hair provocations sported by Mexican American youth.”
latimes.com/lifestyle/imag…
latimes.com/lifestyle/imag…
In short, our client does not look like the kind of Mexican American who might identify with white supremacy. Newsmax used this fact to support the idea that the shooter was not actually a neo-Nazi.
During his show, Greg Kelly also claimed that our client was a member of the “Puro Tango Blast” prison gang, based entirely on a ridiculous and false right-wing social media rumor about the shooter’s hand tattoo.
If you’re a Chicano in the Dallas-area, being labeled a member of “Puro Tango Blast” is a genuine threat to your life.
The next defendants are Steven Crowder and Louder with Crowder, LLC. If you’re unfamiliar with Crowder, an obnoxious extremist provocateur masquerading as a journalist, a quick Google News search will produce a glut of cringeworthy results.
On his show and his website, Crowder repeatedly published our client’s photo as the shooter. Crowder told his audience, “They want to tell you that he was a white supremacist and not see his very Hispanic looking face.”
Much like Newsmax, Crowder tried to use our client’s Chicano appearance to deny the reality of the shooter’s neo-Nazi ideology to his far-right audience.
The next defendant is Timcast Media Group, Inc., which is Tim Pool’s company that operates his show, website, and podcast. Timcast repeatedly published articles on its website portraying our client as the shooter.
Also, the thumbnail image for Tim Pool’s daily show featured the image of our client as well, broadcasting his face not only to viewers, but in the feeds of every YouTube user who was served the video in their timeline.
Interestingly, Pool claimed in another episode that he did not want to show the social media photos discovered by @AricToler “considering the sensitive nature of these things,” and thus did not show any of the photos of the real shooter.
@AricToler Pool also criticized Toler, claiming he “didn’t verify it.” Yet when Pool said this, Timcast had already published a different, unverified, and incorrect photo of our client, and they would do it again repeatedly the following day.
@AricToler To add to the problem, Pool and his employees denied the reality of the Allen Outlet Mall shooting, telling the Timcast audience that the event was a psychological operation (“psyop”).
@AricToler Regarding the shooter’s social media page, Pool said, “You see, here’s where we get into the psyop. No one knows if this Russian social media profile actually belongs to this guy … The photos that are coming out …They don’t show his face.”
@AricToler In reality, the profile Pool referenced did in fact contain photographs of the actual shooter’s face, as well as tattoos matching crime scene photos, along with other verifiable evidence.
@AricToler But perhaps the most outrageous conduct was committed by Univision, the multibillion-dollar media conglomerate that produces Spanish-speaking news and entertainment.
@AricToler Univision featured our client’s image as the neo-nazi mass murderer for multiple days on its primetime news shows, seen by millions of viewers each evening.
@AricToler In fact, our client’s image was shown prominently behind Noticiero Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos during his evening newscast. Ramos is arguably the most trusted media celebrity in the world.
@AricToler After hearing from a neighbor that my client’s image was shown on Univision, my client’s mother contacted a local Univision reporter, who told her that she would inform management immediately, but nobody ever reached out.
@AricToler Even worse, when my co-counsel Greg Adler and I provided a demand letter, Univision initially denied that it had broadcast our client’s image on its primetime shows.
@AricToler Univision claimed it had conducted a search and that it had only shown our client’s image on “Linea de Fuego,” a little-watched show on Univision’s fledging streaming service, ViX, which we identified in our demand with a YouTube link.
@AricToler We didn’t trust this answer, so we hired a media monitoring service who located Univision’s over-the-air broadcasts from those days. Unlike internet and cable programming, past episodes of over-the-air television are not easy to find.
@AricToler That’s when we discovered that Univision had defamed Mauricio for days to millions of people.
@AricToler The thing you’ve got to understand about our client Mauricio is that he’s a really chill guy, a bit goofy and very outgoing, but also very shy. Being labeled as a neo-mass child killer by all these media outlets devastated him.
@AricToler People called Mauricio’s mom and expressed their condolences that her son was the shooter. The family also received threats.
@AricToler And Mauricio is tortured by the idea of all the people he’s known through his life who didn’t contact the family and will continue to believe the story. And he can’t stop thinking about the millions of strangers who saw him as the murderer.
@AricToler In short, each of these media outlets recklessly portrayed our client as a neo-Nazi mass murderer, and each of them have shown him nothing but disrespect.
@AricToler That is something we cannot accept. We will not allow media organizations to falsely accuse an innocent man of being a neo-Nazi mass murderer without being held accountable. We’ll see them in court.
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