Lawyers head to Los Angeles County Superior Court to file charges against three people who claimed via social media that the band sexually harassed or assaulted their teenage fans.
American pop-punk band All Time Low filed a lawsuit yesterday (Feb. 3) against three people who claimed on various social media platforms that the group sexually harassed or assaulted their teenage fans.
The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court claims that band members Jack Barakat, Alex Gaskarth, Zack Merrick and Rian Dawson “are the victims of defamatory social media posts falsely and maliciously accusing them of sexual abuse and knowingly enabling such illegal conduct.”
According to the court documents, the band members plan to “utilize discovery including subpoenas to uncover the identities of those that defamed them.”
The document also notes that All Time Low “would have preferred to first confront the perpetrators before initiating a lawsuit” and were “left no choice because the perpetrators hid behind social media pseudonyms to avoid taking responsibility for their defamatory and harmful posts.”
The lawsuit comes nearly four months after the band shared a joint statement via Twitter on Oct. 25 denying the accusations. “The allegations being brought against us are absolutely and unequivocally false,” the band wrote.
The first defendant, identified as Doe 1, posted two videos to TikTok in October 2021, claiming “a famous pop-punk band” offered her beer on a tour bus and asked for her bra “for their nasty collection” when she was 13. She followed up with another video with the caption, “Spent all day crying because people’s favourite pop-punk bad are pedos.”
While she didn’t name the band in her posts, the court papers state that she left clues that made it very easy to identify that she was talking about All Time Low.
A second Twitter user named @spidahkii said they went to the gig together, and Doe 1’s allegations “never happened”. Doe 1 also admitted she posted her statements “to be petty towards a peer,” made her video private and changed her username.
Weeks after the first false allegation, another female Twitter user, @ATLstatement (referred to as Doe 2 in the court filing), posted a statement to Twitter and TikTok alleging Barakat sexually abused her in 2011 when she was 15 years old. Her Twitter account has since been suspended.
Doe 3 in the lawsuit, Twitter user @dietsodasage posted that she had counted 97 allegations against All Time Low. “Without any evidence whatsoever, Doe 3 egregiously and falsely claimed that ’97 allegations’ had been made against the band, an accusation that spread like wildfire on the Internet. Doe 3 later admitted to acting irresponsibly in spreading this falsehood without verifying it, but by then, it was too late,” The court papers read.
Since the allegations, the band have been conspicuous by their absence from their socials – However, yesterday, they posted photos on Instagram and Facebook photos of them seemingly writing music together, a notebook with ‘LP8″ scribbled on the cover and a caption “It’s about that time again. #ATLLP8”
The band are yet to make a public statement on the lawsuit.
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