What a jerk! W**ker’s $25-million Twitch lawsuit is a stroke of madness, and shows the US legal system is broken

Randy American Erik Estavillo is suing Twitch for injuries caused by excessive masturbation while watching sexy gamers. He’s clearly pulling a fast one, but what does it say about the US that a case like this is even possible?

It looks like things could get very sticky indeed for the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch, which is now being sued by a self-confessed sex addict for a staggering $25 million.

Erik Estavillo – doesn’t his name even sound like a porn star’s? – claims he injured himself ‘down below’ while frequently, er, pleasuring himself, as result of being drawn, like a moth to a flame, to the website because it has “too many scantily clad gamers” on it.

Come again? I had to reach for the Kleenex myself to wipe away the tears of laughter when I read how this halfwit spent endless hours gazing at women’s breasts while fiddling with himself, and claiming he was embarrassed whenever anyone asked why his eyes were so bloodshot.

Does he not realize he’ll be more than just red-faced when he climbs up into the witness box and has to spill the beans?

Now, I’m not going to go too much into the nitty gritty details of this “frivolous” lawsuit – as a spokesperson for Twitch describes this case – because many of the details are rather graphic. You’d be better off reading one of the British redtops if you want the full ins-and-outs of all the self-harm he caused himself.

But get this: Estavillo – who claims his manhood suffered from both severe pain and mild infections because of his Twitch addiction – is also actually alleging his computer went on fire during one incident, which then caused a total blackout in his entire apartment block.

Talk about literally being caught with your pants down. You can just picture him falling flat on his face, as he desperately tries to abscond the flames, his jeans down around his ankles. It sounds like a plotline lifted straight from ‘There’s Something About Mary’, doesn’t it? 

It has subsequently emerged that this genius, who has been dubbed ‘The PSN Plaintiff,’ has a history of pursuing “frivolous” lawsuits – including ones against Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony.

I know he’s starting to sound like an out and out litigious w***er here, but, in his defense, I’d blame the American legal system equally. It is obviously broken if it allows an off-the-wall case such as this, considering he’s someone with a track record of wasting the court’s time. Why was there no red siren going off before it got anywhere near court?

It’s a big turn-off to the American way of life for me to discover there’s more and more Yanks “overreaching” with ridiculous sex claims like this one, with the companies there losing money hand over fist because they have a policy of settling the vast majority of cases that come in front of them.

“Lawyers know that if they file 10 cut-and-paste complaints, five may settle because many businesses are eager to avoid litigation expenses and liability risk. In many instances, the lawyers get paid by the defendant to ‘go away’ while consumers get little or nothing,” says a report by the Empire Center for Public Policy.

A major part of the problem is these lawyers are ambulance chasers, on a large cut of the spoils, and who will chance their arm with any case, because they know most of them will never go to trial.

It’s not an all-of-the-sudden new trend to go down the sex route claim, either. While researching this op-ed, I was surprised to come across a lawsuit involving an American who sued Budweiser in 1991 for false advertising “after the attractive women in their beer ads failed to materialise in his own life.”

It’s hard to swallow how he sought £6,500 (about $8,000) from the brewer for mental injury, emotional stress and, yes, even financial loss. He was probably reluctant to pick up the next bar tab for all his mates after his case was dismissed.

Talking about false advertising… I’m guessing the aforementioned guy was no oil painting, but some Americans certainly don’t believe beauty is anything more than skin deep, judging by how a husband dragged his own wife through court after she gave birth to an “ugly” baby and it subsequently transpired she’d never told him about several plastic surgery ops she had undergone before they’d met.

He had the balls to sue on the grounds of “false pretenses, claiming she misled him by hiding her cosmetic history.” She was forced to cough up more than $120,000. You don’t need to be Mystic Meg to guess they’re probably still not together.

Sometimes it isn’t even silly money being bandied about, with one disgruntled 37-year-old gentleman from Texas settling for $17.31 – the price of the cinema ticket he had splashed out on for his date, whom he threatened to sue because he was “offended” when she kept texting during the movie Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2. It sounds like money well spent, if it meant getting this guy off her back.

The cinema ticket incident wasn’t even the lowest figure to spark off a lawsuit, with two guys suing Penthouse for false advertising after they splashed out $8.99 on the magazine in 2002, because they were left deflated when they discovered the supposedly topless pics of Anna Kournikova inside, as promised, were actually of a little-known ex-model.

But, as is the increasingly worrying American way, these two jokers didn’t just want a refund, but actually sought silly money in what became known as the ‘Anna Porn-ikova’ case. Penthouse, in their infinite wisdom, settled for an undisclosed sum.

Even the woman in question ended up having her day in court, too. Kournikova, who had forewarned the mag it wasn’t her in the topless pics, took them to the cleaners, claiming “violation of her privacy rights and for portraying her in a false light.”

There’s something seriously wrong with America when you have jerks like Estavillo busy firing off legal missives just as frequently as they’re being caught with their pants down. It brings a whole new unsavory meaning to Gordon Gekko’s“greed is good” mantra.

It makes a complete mockery of the entire judicial system and it needs a serious overhaul, especially when it comes to these unscrupulous ambulance-chasing lawyers.

I reckon the likes of YouPorn is breathing a dramatic sigh of relief that they haven’t been sued yet. But who’s to say, though, it won’t be next in the firing line if Estavillo actually wins his bizarre case? Or maybe someone bored and totally mad – always a lethal combination – will set their sights on Google just for allowing people to search for porn? Nothing would surprise me with the US legal system.

Like this story? Share it with a friend!