REDUXX WEEKLY ROUNDUP: LAWSUIT EDITION

As a new Monday approaches, we are back… but with a slightly different newsletter this week.

While we usually go through our stories of the week, today we wanted to get our Substack family up-to-date on a very important announcement Reduxx made yesterday on X.

We’re getting sued! Why, you may ask? Because we called a man… a man.

For some context, on October 15, 2024, Reduxx published an article titled EXCLUSIVE: Award-Winning Trans-Identified Male Author From Taiwan Sues Critics Who Say He’s Not A “Lesbian.”

The article was focused on a Taiwanese-born writer named Li Kotomi. Kotomi, an author, is a trans-identified male currently residing in Japan.

The article reported on Kotomi’s campaign of terror against women’s rights advocates, and how he had filed multiple lawsuits and criminal charges against women who refused to validate his identity as a “woman” and “lesbian.”

As always, our article did not participate in validating Kotomi’s self-declared claim to womanhood. We referred to Kotomi as a man, and used “he/him” pronouns throughout. We also included some of his other aliases - including his birth name.

All of the details we published utilized data that was publicly accessible.

Kotomi is now suing us because of this article.

His argument? That it was defamatory, invasive, and “factually incorrect” to refer to him as a man because he is “legally and socially a female.”

Note that in Japan, truth is NOT a defense against such claims. “Outing” a trans-identified male is often held as illegal, and “misgendering” them can be considered a legally actionable “insult” regardless of the underlying facts.

In addition to hefty monetary damages, Kotomi is seeking to compel a Japanese court to order us to remove the article we published about him.

Though we are not a Japanese entity, Kotomi was able to file against us by aiming his lawsuit at a single Reduxx writer living in Japan. Concerningly, because he did not have all of her details in order to serve her, Kotomi tracked down people he believed to be her associates and locations he believed her to be present. He named unrelated parties in his filing in an effort to effectively “smoke out” our writer. We now have to move for the record to be corrected and the unrelated parties to be redacted because he employed this very sick strategy.

We believe the move was calculated to both advance the suit and intimidate us by raising concerns for our writer’s safety. Perhaps Kotomi believed this pressure would cause us to simply back down and comply.

We won’t be.

We have found a highly experienced lawyer in Tokyo specializing in free speech eager to take on this case, protect our writer, and defend our speech against Kotomi’s frivolous claims.

On Saturday, we put out a call to action on X asking for donations from our readers to help us cover the costs of taking on a legal battle of this scale… and boy did you guys ever pull through! We have raised the money to cover his retainer, and are initiating the process of paying him ASAP.

Once that is completed, we will hopefully be able to release his name and more details on the entire process.

If Kotomi wins, he is demanding approx. $40,000 USD in damages, in addition to other potential penalties. But we have a strong case, and don’t intend to back down any time soon.

We have absolutely no idea what this case is going to cost at this point in time, or how long it could potentially drag out. If you’d like to pitch in to our coffer to help us cover these mounting fees as well as keep Reduxx going in the interim, every penny is appreciated.

Ever-resourceful, we also unshelved some fun Reduxx tote bags we had designed earlier this year in anticipation that we would be releasing a full merch restock. Obviously that is now on hold indefinitely, but we figured we mind as well make the bags available for sale now to help us fund this suit. So if you need a new tote bag that pisses off the right people, check them out!

Well… that’s the update!

Again, we hope to have more details for our lovely readers once some serious paperwork is dealt with this week.

As always, thank you for sticking around. We love ya.

-RXX Team