Turtleboy Files For Summary Judgment After Deposition Where Tony Branch Admits To Lying About College Degree, Defrauding DCF, Lying About Being Bishop  

 

Editors Note: My attorney in this lawsuit has put in a ton of work on this case because he’s passionate about defending the First Amendment against charlatans and pedophiles like Tony Branch. We agreed to a $15K flat fee, which is significantly less than a lawsuit like this normally would be, on top of defending me in the Jamie Genereux lawsuit. He has done a fantastic job of exposing Branch, and we would greatly appreciate any donations to the legal fees by clicking here.

Attorney Ryan McLane, who is representing me in the lawsuit filed by fake Bishop Tony Branch in Brockton Superior Court, has filed a motion of summary judgment after Branch’s deposition last month. (Click here to read up on who Tony Branch is if you haven’t been following.) Here’s a video of one woman’s claims (who just like Branch lost custody of her kids, was accused of child abuse, and has multiple civil judgments against them in court) that Tony Branch is a real bishop, debunked by screenshots of Branch’s own testimony in which he admits to being a fraud. It should be noted that she is listed as his star witness in the lawsuit.

A motion for summary judgment is similar to a motion to dismiss, but occurs after both parties have shared discovery (evidence they intend to use at trial). The summation of the discovery we received were text messages from a woman named Didi Calhoun calling him Bishop and telling him “no go,” which according to Tony Branch proves that she read the 2016 Turtleboy blog that jokingly called Branch a fake Bishop, and was telling him that he wouldn’t be hired because the church took it literally.

 

This is his certificate of ordination, proving he’s a bishop.

As you can see it doesn’t say Bishop anywhere on it, and it appears as if either he or someone else wrote “elder” (notice how the letters in elder don’t connect like the other words, and appears to be bolder) after the certificate was signed. You can purchase a 12 pack of these certificates online for $14 by clicking here.

He also submitted a bizarre video, which he claims is his ordination as a bishop. During the 30 minute video that we watched in Turtle Club Tony Branch appears to be spontaneously convulsing as the power of Christ takes over his neurological functions and he begins screaming in tongue. Nowhere in the 2010 video does the man ordaining him mention the word bishop.

Nevertheless, he insists that this video, the text messages to Didi, and the certificate prove that he is a real bishop, that I knew he was a real bishop, that I said he wasn’t maliciously, and that as a result of this libel he lost $42K worth of income.

Here is the entire transcript of Tony Branch’s deposition:

branch anthony condensed pdf

 

Some highlights:

• He has no evidence that he was denied preaching jobs because of the 2016 Turtleboy article that I didn’t even write.

 

• He claims he was paid $600-800 to perform a dozen weddings a year, but that the weddings immediately stopped as a direct result of the Turtleboy blog. He can’t name a single person who cancelled a wedding as a result of the blog and has no evidence to back up this assertion. When he was asked why he didn’t report any income from weddings on his 2016 bankruptcy filing that we submitted as evidence, he said that he shreds his records every 3 years so all of his evidence is gone.

 

• He claims that the text messages prove that he was denied a job as a preacher as a result of the blog, even though the blog wasn’t mentioned. He claims this happened in a phone call, but the witnesses he claims told him this are not on the witness list.

 

• He claims that “elder” means the same thing as bishop, therefore he is a bishop. He wrongly interpreted a biblical passage to prove that, since he only has a certificate that says elder. Branch claims the man in the video was a bishop, but he’s dead so he can’t confirm any of this. He just kept talking, and talking in order to try to get around it. He believes that he can say he is a bishop without any evidence, and that no one else can question that assertion, because “freedom of religion.”

 

• He lied on his resume, which he submitted to obtain positions on the Brockton Diversity Commission and other municipal boards, by claiming to have graduated from Bradford College. He admitted that the degree was completely made up because he “really wanted the job” he was applying for in 1989, but then continued to use that same resume for the next 30 years. However, he says that he wasn’t lying every time he submitted the fraudulent resume because he was merely uploading an old resume.

 

 

• Branch claims that he became a bishop in 2010, but admitted that he allowed people to wrongfully call him bishop for almost 30 years.

 

• With respects to the court documents and Facebook page that show that he was a Muslim named Toney Shabazz, he claims that he was just going through a black nationalist phase but that he never went full Muslim. He played dumb and claimed he didn’t even know the Facebook page Toney Shabazz existed, even though he had recently update his Facebook story.

 

• He claims the NAACP suspended him from his position for a week, presumably because they believed the Turtleboy article that labeled him as a fake bishop. However, now that much more damaging information has come out (that he had sex with a 15 year old girl, committed fraud, had orders taken out on him by women, etc), the NAACP isn’t suspending him at all.

 

• Tony’s big beef was that I hadn’t researched him enough, and had I done so I would’ve discovered that he was a real bishop. Except nothing he provided proves he was a bishop or can be found using a Google search. He also admitted that the blogs written about him in 2022 were much more damaging to him, and had the blogger done the same research in 2016 they would’ve discovered everything I did.

 

 

• He claims that he was defamed in the 2016 blog because it said that he “bilked the taxpayers.” However, Tony was forced to admit that his divorce filings show that he and his ex-wife conspired to defraud DCF and the HUD which are taxpayer funded entities, as well as privately owned entities like insurance companies.

 

 

I’ve been part of a lot of depositions during my undefeated streak as a defendant in libel suits, but I’ve never seen a plaintiff do more to damage his own case than Tony Branch did during his. Consequently Attorney McLane filed this scathing summary judgment, which Branch’s piecemeal attorney has until September 6 to object to.

 

 

TBMSJMEMO (2)

In the 20 page document McLane argues that:

1. I did not publish the blog, the plaintiff can’t prove that I did, and therefore Turtleboy was acting as a platform, not a publisher. When you do that you are protected by Section 230 immunity, which Facebook and Twitter use to protect themselves from lawsuits when third parties use their platforms to write defamatory things about other people. A platform owner is not liable for content posted by third parties on their website.
2. Calling Tony Branch a fake bishop was hyperbole at the time, although it ended up being true upon further examination.
3. Everything that was written about Tony Branch, including that he bilked the taxpayers, was substantially true.
4. Branch has no damages, and readily admits that he can’t back up any of his assertions that he does have damages.
5. There was no malice in publishing the 2016, which is required to win a defamation judgment on a public figure (which Branch has been deemed to be by the court). Branch admitted in the deposition that the 2022 blogs were much more damaging than the 2016 blog. It’s undeniable that there was no malice because if the blogger wanted to they could’ve done more research and published the much more damaging allegations that Branch had sex with a 15 year old girl when he was 36, filed for bankruptcy, owed over $100K to creditors, used a fake degree for financial gain, was pretending to be a Muslim, defrauded DCF and the HUD, lied about being a bishop for 30 years, had orders taken out on him by multiple women, lost his license due to nonpayment of child support, filed a lawsuit against his wife’s former boss who he wrongfully accused of banging her after her obtained an order on Branch, and was charged for having ammunition in violation of the order against his ex-wife.

In other words, Tony Branch would’ve been much better off had he not filed this frivolous lawsuit in the first place. He was hoping I would settle with him for $600, but I don’t give in to people like this. I expose them for the cockroaches that they are.