James McGibney

In April 2012, McGibney purchased controversial revenge porn[11][12] site Is Anyone Up? from Hunter Moore for less than US$15,000.[3] Web traffic for the site was redirected to BullyVille.com. This effectively shut down the previous site, and was the stated intent of McGibney.[13][14] Three days after the transaction, Moore used his Twitter account to accuse McGibney of being a pedophile, of possessing child pornography[15] and threatening to rape McGibney's wife.[16]

McGibney sued Moore for defamation in Nevada's Clark County District Court in February 2013.[17] The court entered a default judgment against Moore in the sum of $250,000 plus court costs and attorney fees.[18]

In December 2015, McGibney was ordered to pay a $1 million Anti-SLAPP court sanction and $300,000 in attorney's fees to Neal Rauhauser for filing a series of baseless lawsuits against him.[19] The ruling was temporarily reversed when the presiding judge granted McGibney's request for a new trial in February 2016, but reinstated in favor of Rauhasuer on 14 April 2016 with the SLAPP sanction against McGibney reduced from $1 million to $150,000.[20][21] The judge ruled that McGibney had filed the suits to willfully and maliciously injure Rauhauser and to deter him from exercising his constitutional right to criticize McGibney.[19] On April 19, 2018 a three judge panel in the Texas 2nd District Court of Appeals vacated the monetary and non-monetary sanctions findings, and reversed and remanded the amount of attorney's fees awarded in ruling that the trial court had abused its discretion.[22] The court of appeals further reversed the finding of "willfully and maliciously" and noted that Rauhauser's attorney had engaged in a "troublesome pattern of heavy front-end loading of legal work" in an affidavit justifying the attorney's fees he sought.[23]