As Tuesday begins, we take a look back at the manufactured outrage presented by SeanPaul “Long Island Audit” Reyes over the past week because Mayor Paul Alfrey of Melbourne Florida responded to Reyes’ defamation lawsuit.
Reyes went live on Tuesday night to read the response to the accusations against Alfrey. Reyes contends that Alfrey’s mentioning of an outside YouTuber in his official capacity as mayor on his Facebook page is actionable.
The YouTuber went on to fundraise off of Alfrey’s supposed claim that Reyes directly sent him death threats and, outside of the lawsuit, has been making allegations of criminal activity by the mayor.
Reyes was originally recruited into the situation by the mayor’s former sister-in-law, who says she’s been locked out of a business that her late husband shared with the mayor. Reyes contends that he is “independent” in his “exposure” of the supposed corruption and that the mainstream media cannot be trusted as it is politically biased.
The Long Island based YouTuber has made multiple trips to Florida to conduct his investigations and to confront the mayor at city council meetings, despite minimal support from the community.
In the filing, Alfrey starts with the argument that Reyes lacks standing as an individual to file the case as all actions Reyes performed under the capacity of his business, Long Island Audit, which is considered a corporation.
Under Florida law, Reyes, acting on behalf of the corporation, cannot represent himself and must have an attorney to file suit on behalf of the corporation. Furthermore, since Reyes’ corporation is not registered in the state of Florida, it lacks standing to file suit.
He also challenged Reyes’ claims that Reyes was significantly damaged by his mention of a YouTuber whose followers sent threats to himself and the city government. According to Alfrey, Reyes did not demonstrate a financial loss, nor did he show a loss of subscribers.
In fact, as of recent videos, Reyes was still promoting recent gains in subscribers as he approached the 1,000,000-subscriber mark on his main Long Island Audit YouTube channel.
While Reyes’ revenue from his videos has skyrocketed in recent months, his GoFundMe status has been mixed. Reyes joined the entire market in a field of goose eggs for Saturday, Sunday and Monday, as no donations were made to any of the crowd sourcing campaigns we follow.
Finally, Alfrey contended in his filing that to win a defamation case, Reyes must show that Alfrey published the remarks, that the remarks were false, that he knowingly acted falsely or recklessly against a private person, Reyes suffered action damages based on those actions and that the statement itself must be defamatory.
Alfrey contends that Reyes can only prove that the statement was published and nothing else. With that, along with all the other factors, the case must be dismissed.
Reyes has yet to respond to the filing.
He is expected to go live on Tuesday with his latest outrage livestream.
