More than two years after filing a libel lawsuit over anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct, Jack Barakat and his band All Time Low are still working to unmask the accuser who went online in 2021 and claimed to be a former fan abused by Barakat as an underage girl, the group’s lawyer says. At a Wednesday morning hearing, the judge overseeing the lawsuit asked for an update on the civil case first filed back in 2022 . “It’s getting kind of old,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Daniel S.
Murphy said from the bench. “What’s the holdup?” The band’s lawyer, Michael Garfinkel, said he needed more time to identify and serve any of the Doe defendants listed in the complaint. “It’s been rough sledding, but we keep persisting,” Garfinkel said.
“We very much appreciate your patience along the way. I would like to try to see this effort through, if that’s all right with the court.” In filings ahead of the hearing, Garfinkel informed the court that subpoenas previously sent to Twitter and TikTok had failed to identify the central accuser in the case.
The allegedly female accuser, referred to as Doe 2, gave the most detailed first-person account of alleged abuse referenced in the lawsuit. In a lengthy statement posted online in October 2021 , Doe 2 alleged that Barakat sexually abused her over several years, starting in 2011 when she was a 15-year-old fan who snuck backstage after a show. Garfinkel wrote to the court that Doe 2 used a “temporary �.