DC church vandalized by the Proud Boys gains control over the group's trademark
The Brief
D.C. Superior Court grants rights to the trademark of the group's name to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church
The ruling also bars the Proud Boys members from selling any merchandise with its name or symbols without the church's consent.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A judge recently awarded a historic Black church in Washington, D.C. control over the Proud Boys trademark after the far-right group defaulted on a $2.8 million judgment.
The Monday ruling in D.C. Superior Court grants rights to the trademark of the group's name to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church and bars the Proud Boys members from selling any merchandise with its name or symbols without the church's consent. The ruling also allows the church to try to seize any money made from selling the group's merchandise.
The church filed the lawsuit to try to recoup damages from vandalism made by group members after a December 2020 pro-Donald Trump rally. Black Lives Matter banners were torn down and burned at two churches, including Metropolitan African Methodist. There were also violent clashes between opposing protesters and arrests were made that night.
Enrique Tarrio, then the leader of the Proud Boys, confessed to participating in the burnings and was later sentenced to more than five months in jail on those and other charges. Tarrio was later sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for orchestrating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump granted pardons, commutations or vowed to dismiss cases against the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol— including Tarrio.
In a lengthy statement posted to X, Tarrio wrote, "The presiding judge has denied due process to myself and the other defendants, preventing us from presenting a proper defense." Tarrio also suggested in separate posts that the Proud Boys rename themselves, "African Methodist Episcopal Boys" and asked for suggestions on a new name.
Case records show the lawsuit was served to Tarrio at the federal prison where he was housed when it was filed, as well as to at least one other address associated with him and another member. The church lawsuit called the actions on Dec. 12, 2020 "acts of terror" and said they were meant to intimidate the members of the church.
A default judgement was awarded to the church in June 2023. After no payments were made and no responses were filed by the Proud Boys or their representatives, lawyers for the church filed a motion in December seeking rights to the trademark.
An attorney representing the church in the civil action did not respond to a request for comment. Nayib Hassan, Tarrio's attorney, declined to comment.
The Source
Information from the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
21 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Self-proclaimed skinhead convicted of threatening pregnant Black woman faces at least 38 years in prison
A swastika-tattooed man was convicted Monday of berating and menacing a pregnant Black woman and threatening the life of her unborn child and now faces at least 38 years in prison after the Orange County district attorney appealed an earlier sentence he called too 'lenient.' The case began nearly seven years ago, when Tyson Theodore Mayfield, a self-proclaimed skinhead, berated and menaced a pregnant Black woman waiting for her bus on a Fullerton bench, according to prosecutors. The then-42-year-old Mission Viejo man clenched his fists and threatened the life of the woman's unborn child, according to a criminal complaint. The woman, known as Jane Doe in court documents, fled and called Fullerton police, who didn't locate the man. She soon returned to the bench and so did Mayfield, who threatened her again amid a barrage of racial slurs, according to court documents. This time, Doe tucked into a nearby restaurant and called the police, who found and apprehended Mayfield. That arrest and a guilty plea on two felony counts and one misdemeanor count initially resulted in a five-year sentence. After a series of court disputes and pressure from groups, including the Orange County district attorney's office, Mayfield will serve at least 38 years, according to prosecutors. 'I hope that no one else ever has to feel the absolute blood-chilling terror this young mother described as she had to run for her life, and the life of her baby, not because of what she did, but because of the color of her skin,' Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said in a statement. A call to the public defender's office was not returned. Mayfield, now 49, was charged with one felony count of making a hate crime criminal threat with the ability to commit a violent injury, one felony count of criminal threats and one misdemeanor count of petty theft in September 2018. He plead guilty in May 2019 and was originally offered a two-year sentence, according to the DA's office. Orange County Superior Court Judge Roger B. Robbins eventually upped the sentence to five years, but dropped one of Mayfield's previous two strikes, according to the DA's office. That action prevented Mayfield from facing California's much harsher three-strikes sentencing, which calls for a minimum of 25 years imprisonment. Mayfield was previously convicted for felony assault with a deadly weapon in 2005 and felony mayhem in 2008 in Orange County. He was also charged and convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime using a racial slur and punching a man in 2017. Spitzer disagreed with Robbins, arguing that the five-year sentence was too 'lenient,' and groups such as the NAACP and the Orange County Human Relations Commission rallied in support of Doe. 'He is indiscriminately picking out people on the street because he doesn't like the way they look and using violence against them,' Spitzer said of Mayfield in court in 2019. 'Is a five-year sentence going to protect society against someone so evil?' Eventually, Spitzer appealed to California's 4th District Court of Appeals later that year, claiming that Robbins abused his discretion as a judge to drop a strike. The appeals court agreed with Spitzer, noting that Robbins' action shocked them. The case was sent back to trial court and was delayed, according to Kimberly Edds, the district attorney's director of public affairs, as the defense argued that their client wasn't mentally sound. Mayfield eventually stood trial, was found guilty Monday and is due back in court Aug. 29 where faces a sentence of at least 38 years in prison. 'While Judge Robbins ignored that young woman's pleas for justice, thankfully the jury did not ignore the facts and convicted Tyson Mayfield of exactly what he did: threaten a pregnant black woman because he is a racist,' Spitzer said. 'We will never allow hate to win.'
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Bezos spoke to Trump as he tries to seeks more government contracts for Blue Origin, WSJ reports
(Reuters) -Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos spoke to U.S. President Donald Trump at least twice this month as he tries to capitalize on a feud between rival SpaceX founder Musk and Trump and bag more government contracts, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The CEO of Blue Origin, Dave Limp, also made a trip to the White House to meet with Trump's chief of staff, the WSJ said, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Fed chief Powell is starting to worry about the reliability of economic data
Jerome Powell raised concerns over economic data quality affecting Fed policy. Budget cuts and staffing shortages at the Bureau of Labor Statistics impact data accuracy. Increased data imputations may lead to misleading inflation and employment figures. For a Federal Reserve operating with a data-driven approach to monetary policy, what happens when the data is wrong? Chairman Jerome Powell has been receiving rising pressure from President Donald Trump — and more recently, other Fed officials — to cut rates, but there's another issue that Powell's worried about: the quality of economic data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists have been raising concerns about this topic for the last few months, and Powell voiced his own concerns on Tuesday during his testimony to Congress. "I wouldn't say that I'm concerned about the data today, although there has been a very mild degradation of the scope of the surveys," Powell said when Rep. Sam Liccardo asked him about his thoughts on data quality. "But I would say the direction of travel is something I'm concerned about." "It's really important not just for the Fed, but for Congress and for businesses, frankly, to know what really is going on in the economy," Powell continued. "I don't like to see the kind of stories I'm reading and the idea being that the data is going to become more volatile and less reliable. That'll make it more difficult for the private sector and for you and for us. That means inflation, employment, and other economic measures that the Fed and other institutions depend on to determine policy might be less accurate than they were in the past. DOGE cuts on government funding could be a culprit. BLS was not spared from budget cuts earlier this year, and a proposal in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill is aiming to further reduce the agency's budget by $56 million. Staffing shortages at the BLS have resulted in reduced data availability. BLS teams calculate CPI numbers by collecting price quotes across 75 urban areas in 200 item categories. On June 16, BLS announced it had suspended data collection in Buffalo, NY. This follows the agency's April suspension of CPI data collection in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Provo, Utah. BLS said the number of imputations, or estimated values, in CPI data increased in April due to these changes, but affirmed that these exclusions have an overall "minimal impact" on inflation data. Torsten Sløk, Apollo's chief economist, pointed out that imputations have increased significantly in the last few months, reducing data quality. Usually, around 10% of the CPI values are imputed when data is not available. However, the May percentage is estimated to be triple the average, at 30%. "In other words, almost a third of the prices going into the CPI at the moment are guesses based on other data collections in the CPI," Sløk wrote in a note last week. This could be leading to more frequent revisions of economic data, experts say, and the labor market is another area of scrutiny. The May jobs report showed 139,000 new jobs created, but both Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, and Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, believe the final number could be revised down to around 100,000. Increased imputations can mask new developments in the economy, making inflation and jobs data look more optimistic than they actually are. In Tombs' opinion, the jobs numbers are excluding a large swath of the economy: small businesses, which are filing late as they struggle with tariff impacts. "When there's a gap in the data, [the BLS] just interpolates from past trends, but if the trend itself is weakening, once you actually get the data that you previously had interpolated, usually you find that it's weaker than your original estimate had suggested," Berezin told Business Insider. "The response rate to these surveys is very low, so the Fed has to do a lot of guesswork. And in a weakening economy, usually you're going to be guessing too high on payrolls, rather than too low" Berezin added. Read the original article on Business Insider
