Yashar Ali has indeed done that—showing himself to be a boorish, insensate, juvenile and vicious deadbeat who once made a living writing falsehoods about good people.
A self-described bigot with a plethora of axes to grind, Ali once authored hatchet jobs with abandon, permitting no facts to interfere with his many vendettas.
He thought he could get away with it. He thought he could demand the protection of the First Amendment in order to spew lies and hate speech in the name of “journalism,” while accusing actual journalists of lies and hate speech. He thought he could trample on their freedom of the press with his filthy boots—and that no one would touch him.
He was wrong.
First Amendment karma is real!
On September 3, in a victory for free press and accountability, a California judge dismissed the last vestiges of Ali’s defamation lawsuit against Los Angeles Magazine over their 2021 exposé affording the public a fat glimpse of Ali’s unsavory life.
Their story chronicled that, among other rank and raunchy bits, Ali is a parasitic sponge with a knack for grifting celebrities into letting him raid their refrigerators and sleep on their couches—sometimes for up to nine months (as in the case of comedian Kathy Griffin)—before they finally kick him out, as one would any insufferable pest.
Yashar Ali is broke and broken. Broke in pocketbook and broken in soul. He also owes an awful lot of money to an awful lot of people.
Ali, LA Magazine also revealed, had reneged on a $179,000 loan from oil heiress Ariadne Getty. (Last year, a judge in a separate court hearing—taking about 60 seconds from start to finish—ordered Ali to transfer all his future earnings to pay Ms. Getty back the loan with interest, nearly a quarter million dollars. But the loan, according to LA Times, “remains fully unpaid.”)
After the curtain had been lifted on his scurrilous misdeeds, Yashar Ali lost tens of thousands of social media followers. His employers cut him loose, not wishing to be associated with a scumbag. His former supporters (read “grift victims”) turned their backs on him in disgust. But instead of soberly taking stock of his life, seeing the light and making amends, Ali did the opposite: He filed a defamation lawsuit against LA Mag for speaking sooth—employing the hypocrite’s go-to method of sticking his fingers in his ears and going, “LA-LA-LA-LA,” when he doesn’t wish to hear (or have anyone else discover) that he is a fraud, an embarrassment, a leech, and an all-around sorry excuse for a human being.
In January 2023, a judge dismissed most of Ali’s claims and, in May, ordered him to pay LA Mag’s legal fees.
But Yashar Ali soldiered on, his postings becoming overcaffeinated screechings laced with profanities, which his dwindling followers responded to in kind.
And then, last December, his lawyer ditched him.
Now, why would a lawyer do that?
Hint: Yashar Ali is broke and broken. Broke in pocketbook and broken in soul. He also owes an awful lot of money to an awful lot of people. (Even Getty’s debt collector is ticked off at him, telling the LA Times Ali was “more difficult than average” to track down.)
And, according to court filings, Ali also has no “known local bank accounts” or property.
And no oil heiresses or comedians to pay his bills anymore.
Yashar Ali played the system for his own advantage and earned instead a basket of his own bile. The rock he threw at the edifice of Truth turned out to be a boomerang, smacking him square in the two-face.
So when California shut the door on his lawsuit, it also closed the book—the very unsavory and bilious book—on Yashar Ali.
One might say that Yashar Ali is a modern Aesop’s Fable, with the moral: If you’re going to be a hypocrite, put a stash aside for attorney fees, interest and penalties first.
One might say that Yashar Ali is living proof that reporters who live by the click perish by the court.
One might say that Yashar Ali is a cautionary tale for those in the media who wield the power of the press to promote their prejudices and mask their transgressions.
One might say all these things, and one would be right.
But here’s what we say—Freedom’s memo to those who scream that the First Amendment “is meant for me, not for thee”:
This is your Ghost of Christmas Future moment.
Repent and redeem yourselves or suffer the fate of Yashar Ali, who thought he could soar on a megaphone sopped with lies, but instead came crashing down in a Niagara of mud.
It’s too late for Yashar, but possibly there’s still time for you.
Then again, maybe not.
