Remember that ballsy bald dude at Saddle Ranch who couldn’t restrain himself from screaming at Bristol Palin about what a twit her mother is while she was just trying to grind on a mechanical bull like any other young public figure? Well guess who’s back and stretching out his fifteen minutes by filing a lawsuit in U.S. federal court over the very incident that he started? New York Daily News reports that Stephen Hanks, a local talent manager, is now suing Palin and the Lifetime network for $75,000 in defamation damages, incensed that he was filmed for Bristol’s show, Life’s a Tripp, without permission.
Despite the fact that he screamed “your mother is the devil” and made bad jokes about Levi’s johnson, Hanks is pointing to the homophobic statements Palin threw back at him “in front of others” as the cause of his woes. The original aggressor is claiming “emotional distress” over the incident, which took no time to hit TMZ.
Now look, we approve of this guy’s message, if not his exact choice of words. But as much as we’d like to see a game change in the Palins’ pocket change, it’s much more heroic to take some responsibility for causing the beef in the first place. Calling anyone’s mom “a whore” in public, as Hanks loudly and clearly did, is a certain invitation to a wide variety of responses that more often than not, hit you back in the face, both figuratively and often literally.
So suck it up, dude, and move on. After all, Hanks did our city a heroic service by apparently getting Palin to leave L.A. and run back to Methville, as Bristol explains, “After [the Saddle Ranch incident], I just realized that I was over it. I was ready to come home.” Wouldn’t Hanks’ effort be better spent getting Saddle Ranch to pack up its own douchey reality show and do the same?
