On Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival, a reporter asked George Clooney about Mark Ruffalo, and Clooney said this: “I support Mark Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely. It’s ridiculous. We’re not going to ban speech.”
Nobody had proposed a ban on speech.
I know what a real attempt to punish speech looks like, because I spent the past thirteen months defending two people from one. A Jewish couple from Pennsylvania left two comments on an Instagram post that flagged a Miami lawyer’s writing about Israel. One comment said where she worked. The other wondered how her Jewish clients would feel about her posts. She sued them. Last week, a federal judge in Miami threw out the whole case, and the sentence she used to do it is the one I want everyone in this story to read.
Count the Government Officials
I have written about Ruffalo twice already, so here’s the short version. On August 21, he posted that Larry Ellison is a “classic Oligarch” and that Oracle’s Safra Catz revels in “what we now have come to see as a genocide,” all of it somehow inside a media merger. Paramount answered within a day that it was “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute.” Days later, nearly a thousand industry people signed a statement calling the post antisemitic. Ruffalo called the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”
