When you are accused—anonymously, repeatedly, and in granular detail—of having a nonconsensual sexual relationship with a minor, there are a few normal ways to respond. You can deny it. You can sue. You can issue a clear, on-the-record statement saying “this is false,” like an adult who understands how these things work. Or you can do whatever the hell Royel Otis guitarist Leroy Bressington (known professionally as Royel Maddell) just tried to do, which is ask a U.S. federal court to force Reddit to cough up the names, emails, phone numbers, and IP addresses of anyone discussing the allegation, so he can decide later whether he feels like actually suing them. Normal stuff.
Unsurprisingly, according to a December 24 ruling from Judge William Alsup, the courts were not especially moved by this strategy.
Bressington—an Australian citizen accused of having sex with a 16-year-old student while acting as her music teacher—never actually filed a defamation lawsuit anywhere. To borrow from the contemporary American canon, Bressington had concepts of a lawsuit, and hoped a federal judge would help him flesh out the fine details. Prior to filing any suits, Bressington felt he needed to hunt for the IRL specifics of the people discussing it online, resulting in a speculative, pre-litigation subpoena request that reads less like a legal plan and more like a panic response someone cooked up after doomscrolling their own name (“even just one single user,” the application pleads, with embarrassingly naked desperation). He claims he only needs to know whether the users are based in Australia (presumably in order to hypothetically sue them down the line), yet asks for vastly more personal data than would be required to establish that fact. The court called the request “overreaching” and “overburdensome,” which is judicial code for “we are not turning due process into your personal doxxing concierge.”
The jurisdictional logic fares no better. Bressington claims he can’t file a defamation suit in Australia unless he knows whether the Reddit users are based there—then promptly concedes that Australian courts don’t prohibit evidence-gathering procedures that could establish jurisdiction. In other words, this wasn’t a last resort; it was a shortcut. He wanted U.S. courts to step in not because Australia can’t help him, but because he hadn’t tried asking yet. Look, I understand the temptation—American courts have a long and storied tradition of helping powerful men reframe sexual misconduct as a reputational inconvenience—but even by those standards, this was ambitious.
The timing is also doing him no favors. The filing lands amid Royel Otis’ recent rise—festival slots, millions of listeners, and a song whose chorus (“my girl’s a bitch when she’s moody”) was already drawing backlash before the allegations surfaced. According to Bressington, that success (and specifically that line) helped turn the accusations into online “fodder,” which is a bleak way to describe people discussing an allegation of statutory rape—and also, you could’ve just, like, not written that lyric? But I digress.
Judge William Alsup, mercifully, was not interested. In a ruling that somehow manages to be polite and scathing at the same time, Alsup notes that Bressington “has not yet filed even a placeholder complaint against John Does in a foreign court,” adding that “it would be unusual to request a court’s assistance to obtain discovery in advance of litigation.” “Unusual” here is doing the kind of heavy lifting usually reserved for forklifts. Courts, it turns out, prefer lawsuits that exist outside the conditional tense. Who knew?
Alsup then flags a second, far more damning “unusual” feature of the application. In his filing, Bressington goes out of his way to deny several side issues: that he’s been charged, that a former partner accused him of misconduct, that he was dropped by his label. What he does not do—at any point—is deny the central allegation itself. Judge Alsup notices. He spells it out twice, writing, “Nowhere in his application does Bressington specifically deny that he engaged in a nonconsensual sexual relationship with a minor.” It’s a striking omission—and if he’s trying to prove he’s innocent, it’s a downright baffling one.
There’s something to a cruel irony to this, one that’s hard to imagine Bressington’s legal team failed to foresee: in trying to unmask Reddit users via the public legal system, he ensured that the most explicit allegations—quoted verbatim—are now enshrined in a federal court opinion, which has since been written up at length in dozens of major publications. Speaking only for myself here, I had never heard of these allegations before reading the order. I suspect most people hadn’t. But in trying to scrub them from the realm of deeply-online rumor, Bressington instead upgraded them to headlines—ones that will almost certainly outlive whatever Reddit discourse cycle prompted the application in the first place. He didn’t clear his name. He didn’t refute the allegation. He didn’t even manage to file a lawsuit. What he did do was invite a federal judge to point out, on the record, that he never denied the claim at all. Oops.
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