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Tyler County District Attorney Lucas Babin came short in federal court a year ago in his attempt to hit Netflix with child pornography charges over the controversial Cuties, and now an appeals court has handed the former School of Rock actor another defeat and the streamer another win.
“We do not take accusations of prosecutorial bad faith or harassment lightly,” wrote 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Don R. Willett today of the case from the Woodville, TX-based prosecutor “Nor, absent extraordinary circumstances, are we inclined to exercise our jurisdiction in a way that interferes with ongoing state-court proceedings, he added in a 28-page order from himself and two other judges in Netflix’s favor (read the Cuties appeals court ruling here).
“But the injunction is preliminary, our review is deferential, and existing Supreme Court precedent has calibrated the principles of equity and federalism in a way that authorized the district court’s intervention. For these reasons, the judgment below must be AFFIRMED.”
Long story short-ish, Babin first went after the Sundance winning coming-of-age drama Cuties back on September 2020 with a grand jury indictment and hasn’t shown signs of giving up since. At the time, ex-Young and the Restless performer (for real) Babin slammed the streamer for “knowingly promote visual material which depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created, which appeals to the prurient interest in sex, and has no serious, literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
For the record, the Maïmouna Doucouré-directed Cuties centers on an 11-year-old Senegalese-French girl who is in caught up in the conflict between the morals and ambitions of her tradition Muslim family and those of her dance troupe friends. Launched with a risqué ad campaign that Netflix themselves dropped and replaced, Cuties launched on the streamer on September 9, 2020.
Not long after the grand jury indictment and subsequence controversy spotlight, Netflix was accused of actively messing with its own search algorithm to make it harder to find the film on its platform – a claim the streamer denied, kinda.
Still, after months of the matter jumping in and out of various jurisdictions, Netflix in March 2022 sought injunctive relief to stop “Babin from abusing his office and infringing Netflix, Inc.’s constitutional rights.” Over eight months later, on December 14, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale granted Netflix’s injunctive wish.
Which then saw Babin file with the appeals court for one kick at the courtroom can.
Didn’t go the way he hoped, to put it mildly.
“The district court found that Babin prosecuted Netflix in bad faith— a finding of fact that followed discovery and a seven-hour evidentiary hearing at which Babin testified,” Judge Willett noted today in the appeals court ruling.
“Babin contends on appeal that the district court’s finding in this respect was not only erroneous but clearly so—a contention, we are mindful, that must also surmount considerable deference to the district court’s credibility determinations,” former Republican Texas Deputy Attorney General Willett added. “After carefully reviewing the record and the parties’ arguments at this preliminary stage in the proceedings, we are not left ‘with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.’ To the contrary, sufficient evidence supports the district court’s findings.”
“Netflix has shown at this stage that it has been subjected to a bad-faith prosecution, an injury we have already deemed ‘irreparable,’” Judge Willett said. “Our precedent similarly establishes that injunctions protecting First Amendment rights ‘are always in the public interest.’ Netflix has therefore shown that it is entitled to preliminary injunctive relief.”
Cute.
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