‘The Onion’ Makes Supreme Court Filing in Support of Man Arrested for Parodying Police

An Ohio man is getting the support of The Onion in Supreme Court.

Per a report from the Associated Press, the satirical content provider has filed a Supreme Court brief in connection with the case of Anthony Novak, whose own satirical content resulted in his arrest. In short, Novak is reported to have mocked Parma cops in a series of Facebook posts, including (among other things) a spoof call for new hires and a clearly-fake campaign to intentionally starve homeless people.

Novak, per AP, was eventually arrested in connection with the posts but was later acquitted. In a subsequent (and since-tossed) lawsuit, Novak alleged his rights were violated. The argument leading to that tossing focused largely on the assertion that such content should carry a literal disclaimer.

In the filing, as seen in court documents viewed by Complex on Tuesday, The Onion argued that readers of Novak’s posts were unlikely to have taken any of it seriously. In fact, the filing states, “there is no real doubt that reasonable readers would have no difficulty in ascertaining that Parma’s finest were not actually providing free abortions to teens in a police van, pardoning child sex offenders on the basis of their adeptness at puzzles, or intentionally starving the homeless.”

The suggestion of adding disclaimers to content clearly designed as parody, the Onion team notes, undermines the intention of such work, not to mention the built-in redundancy of such ludicrousness:

“Under a proper understanding of the reasonable-reader test, a disclaimer not only spoils the punchline but is redundant. The Sixth Circuit’s holding stands alone among the otherwise uniform approach courts have taken—and not in a good way.”

The filing itself is a petition for certiorari, meaning The Onion is asking the Supreme Court to force the case into review.

The Onion, meanwhile, remained satirically busy at the time of this writing with recently published pieces on a wildfire “disgusted” by a stove flame and a director who had just quieted a film set in pursuit of an instance of harassment.