Nolan Wells’ Friend Hired An Attorney To Do WHAT?!

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
BartEdmiston Jr., one of the friends on Horn Island with Nolan Wells on July 4th, just retained attorney Russell Latino, who says Edmiston fully cooperated with investigators, turned over his boat, GPS and phone, and flatly denies any involvement in Nolan Wells' death. A lot of people online, who have already decided what happened here, have been naming names and have been accusing him of being involved in the death of his friend, and the murder of his friend is what some are claiming. Latino announced the family is filing defamation lawsuits. We knew this would happen and I applaud it. They've hired a PI firm to attract social media users and says a credible death threat brought in by the FBI has also been brought to the FBI so they're aware of it. The question nobody's asking is whether this legal offensive would even exist if the investigation had given the public a single answer in those 25 days. Latino comes out swinging categorical denial of any sort of involvement here. Voluntary cooperation on the part of Nolan's friend, the boat in the GPS phone all turned over, the PI firm hired nationwide defamation lawsuits announced. That's not a guy playing defense. He's running offense at this point.
Isn't this about establishing that Edmondson has cleared in the court of public opinion before a grand jury gets to weigh in? Is that what this is about? To clear his name with the ether, with the internet before that all gets underway?
What's your take on this? Of filing these suits, we haven't seen them filed yet, but the threats are there. What do you think the odds are of succeeding? There's been a lot of vile commentary on this, about people who were very, very close to Nolan. If they had nothing to do with this, the last thing you'd probably want to do is file a lawsuit that would open yourself up to civil discovery and all sorts of things. If you have something to hide, it would come out. Why would you be filing a lawsuit if you didn't do anything?

**Eric Faddis** (2:26)
Yeah, I think certainly filing a lawsuit, or at least threatening to, gives me some indication that this person is either making a tremendous bluff, or they believe that they have nothing to hide, and that's consistent with how this person has acted throughout the duration of the investigation.
And in terms of the success of the lawsuits, hey, if you can show that a person has made a statement, and that it was a statement of fact, and that it was a statement to the public, and that it's caused you some kind of damages, including having to face death threats that you wouldn't have to face otherwise, then that seems to meet the elements of a defamation claim. Now, whether that claim is really collectible is another issue entirely, but perhaps it doesn't matter to this family, whether it's collectible, perhaps this is an assertion of, hey, putting myself out there and saying not only did I have nothing to do with this, but I have been aggrieved by these falsehoods that have been spread about me. And I think that that certainly could influence the public narrative and could potentially influence the grand jury investigation.

**Tony Brueski** (3:36)
Yeah, I mean, you don't typically see people who are guilty filing civil defamation lawsuits that would open up discovery and all that if they have something to hide, because that would backfire tremendously on them. If you're going to file that, I mean, either you're really grandstanding and hoping that nothing will happen, which does not appear to be what's happening here. It appears that there probably is absolutely nothing to hide.
Not that I'm aware of, not in a lot of cases we've covered, not to say that this hasn't happened in the legal world, Eric. Have you seen any cases like this where people start firing off defamation lawsuits? I guess we have seen one. In the Kohberger case, someone was accusing a professor of being involved with the murder, and that they won tremendously, a tremendous amount of money on that one.
Are we going to start seeing more of this? And I guess, at what point, where... How do you handle this from a legal standpoint? Because there's creators who get on their pulpit and preach to their masses what they believe, and then the masses seem to go along with it, no matter how off base it may be. And the masses then scatter, and their flying monkeys say what they're going to say, and it just scatters out there. Do you go solely after the creators who are making these proclamations of guilt against people who are innocent and never been charged? I don't want to say innocent till proven guilty, never been charged, probably never will be charged with anything. Do you go after the people who are making the big claims, or do you go after all the monkeys as well? The whole circus goes down. How do you handle that from a legal standpoint? Because that's a lot of people, a lot of filing. I don't know how it all works on the back end.