Defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress

2022 · Mass mailing

He mailed it to their neighbors

He sent postcards, postmarked Knoxville, Tennessee, to households throughout the street where his ex-wife, her mother and the children lived. The court found the cards accused them of criminal conduct, gave their home address, named the children, and directed readers to his website. One carried a scriptural quotation about “the whole armour of God.”

The court quoted one of them. It said the two women had “kidnapped our children in the middle of the night” and had spent “728 days… working with corrupted government agents, including Dir. of the FBI Christopher Wray, to fabricate/obfuscate evidence.”

The court found it false. The children were living with their mother under a custody order that court had itself made; her mother was “merely providing living quarters for her daughter and grandchildren”; and “neither party kidnapped the children by either common usage or legal definition of the term.” No agency had ever charged or investigated either woman for anything.

The postcards are what the false light finding rests on. The court held the accusation “highly offensive to a reasonable person” and found the cards “clearly intended to place Plaintiffs in a false light.”

And it recorded what mailing them to the street did. His ex-wife testified that she and the children had been excluded from social activities in their own community since the postcards went out; that she was in counselling for the resulting stress, with $7,002.13 in medical bills; and that she had lost 48.5 hours of work before taking leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and 467.5 hours since.

Findings of fact and conclusions of law, 26 February 2024, at ¶¶3, 12–14 and 23–25 · Stark v. Horner, No. CV-22-969917. The cards themselves are not reproduced here — see the note at the foot of this page.

See also. The protection-order court separately found he had “engaged in menacing conduct”, sending emails and postcards.

4 January – 19 May 2023 · Court order, and his own email

William Easton Horner created 19 YouTube channels with defamatory content

The material the Starks sued over sat on YouTube and on a website he ran. On 4 January 2023 the court ordered it removed. As the channels came down, he opened new ones.

The figure of nineteen comes from two places, a day apart. On 19 May 2023 counsel swore that his eighteenth channel had been taken down and a nineteenth created almost immediately. The day before that, he gave the same number himself — emailing lawyers in two different cases, with the trial judge’s staff attorney copied in, to say that his material could be found

“online on both YouTube under the channel Easton Horner 1-19 as well as on Rights 4 Fathers com.”

The count of nineteen channels is not itself a judicial finding — it comes from counsel’s sworn affidavit and from his own email. What the court found was that the statements he published about the Starks were false, and it measured the video at twenty hours.

Affidavit of counsel, and his email of 18 May 2023 filed as an exhibit, both with the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and sanctions, 19 May 2023 · Stark v. Horner, No. CV-22-969917

19 May 2023 · Granted 2 August 2023

What liability was found on

The plaintiffs moved for summary judgment and sanctions and attached seventy-eight pages of exhibits. Almost all of it is his own material — emails he sent to opposing counsel, transcripts of videos he posted, and a transcript of him answering questions under oath in open court.

The motion was granted on 2 August 2023. That is the date liability was found; damages were assessed seven months later. The same court, the same day, entered a permanent injunction and declared William Easton Horner a vexatious litigator.

The motion is published here in full. Its exhibits are the record of what he was doing while the case ran: the document he titled “Defendant’s Petition for Discovery by Brute Force Attack,” his record of paying a $250 contempt fine in 25,000 pennies, emails to three opposing lawyers with the trial judge copied in, his written threat to break into a hospital’s computer systems, and twenty pages of the hearing transcript.

Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and sanctions · Stark v. Horner, No. CV-22-969917 · 102 pages in the original

See also. What he meant by brute force · more of what he filed and sent, in his own words.

2 August 2023 · Permanent injunction

Every day it stayed up was a separate violation

A permanent injunction ordered him to remove all content claiming his victims had committed crimes — naming his website, his fundraising page (posted under the alias “John Baptist”), his LinkedIn profile and his YouTube channel by URL, “or any iteration thereof.”

The order provides that “each day of publication and each site of publication constitute a separate violation.”

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Judge Brendan J. Sheehan · No. CV-22-969917

See also. He rebuilt the channel eighteen times after being ordered to take it down — the affidavit of counsel.

26 February 2024 · Judgment

Ordered to pay, in total$1,064,234.75

William Easton Horner was found liable for defamation, false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress

Judgment was entered for $907,002.13 — $257,002.13 compensatory and $250,000 punitive to his ex-wife; $200,000 compensatory and $200,000 punitive to her mother. A further $157,232.62 in attorneys’ fees followed in July.

The court found he had published — in postcards mailed to his victims’ neighbors and on his website, LinkedIn, GoFundMe and YouTube — false statements accusing them of serious criminal conduct. The court found the accusations had “no basis”: there was “no evidence that Plaintiffs have been charged or investigated by any local, state, or federal agency for criminal conduct.” He did so, the court found, “maliciously, intentionally and deliberately… to harass and injure,” continuing “with full knowledge that his conduct was tortious.”

The court also found he had posted in excess of 20 hours of video, most of it containing false criminal accusations, threats or other inflammatory statements.

The court found for the plaintiffs on Counts II, IV and V — defamation, invasion of privacy–false light, and intentional infliction of emotional distress — and on Count VII, punitive damages.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Judge Brendan J. Sheehan · Stark v. Horner, No. CV-22-969917

See also. What he actually published is described in his own words. The same court, the same day, declared him a vexatious litigator.

April–May 2025 · Enforcement

The judgment followed him to Tennessee

Two judgment liens were filed, and a certificate of judgment was issued to the Hamblen County Circuit Court in Tennessee, where he now lives. Both liens remain active. Interest accrues at 8%.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas · Nos. JL-25-285311 and JL-25-285776

See also. He was living in Tennessee by January 2021 — see the chronology.