A conservative Christian law firm is gearing up to countersue the Southern Poverty Law Center after the left-leaning firm attempted to bankrupt it with a “frivolous lawsuit” that demanded $200 billion in damages.

The SPLC represented a woman who dragged Liberty Counsel through nine years of legal purgatory, all based on a lie. The SPLC did not originally represent the woman, but joined the case after she sued Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian law firm the SPLC has branded an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center saw Liberty Counsel’s name and that’s when they started salivating, thinking they could come after Liberty Counsel and bankrupt us,” Mat Staver, the Christian firm’s founder and chairman, told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday.

Yet the entire case fell apart when the Vermont woman who sued Liberty Counsel, Janet Jenkins, admitted under oath that the very basis for including the law firm in the suit was a lie, Staver said.

Judge William K. Sessions III, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted Liberty Counsel’s motion on March 31. Sessions ruled that Jenkins’ case against Liberty Counsel had no merit. This came, however, after nine years of legal proceedings involving 186,000 documents, over 500 pages of legal writing, over 5,000 exhibits, and 25 depositions, Staver said.

After all that, the judge ruled that Liberty Counsel played no role in assisting the international kidnapping of a child and that the statute of limitations had run on Jenkins’ claim.

Now, Staver plans to countersue.

“We’re not going to stand back and let SPLC get away with this frivolous lawsuit because they need to now pay for the time and expenses for this frivolous case that they knew was frivolous,” he said. “We’re going to go after Janet Jenkins not only for cost but for attorney’s fees, and we’re going to go after the SPLC for cost and attorney’s fees, as well.”

“Out of all this information that they tried to dredge up, the judge shot down every piece, point by point by point,” he said.

The Daily Signal reached out to the SPLC, which represents Jenkins, for comment and did not receive a response by publication time.

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A Custody Dispute

The case traces back to a custody dispute between a mother and her former lesbian partner. Virginia resident Lisa Miller started a relationship with Jenkins, moved to Vermont, and entered a civil union with her in the early 2000s (Vermont was the first state in the country to legalize civil unions in 2000). Miller was artificially inseminated and gave birth to a daughter in 2002.

Miller converted to Christianity, rejected her previous lesbian lifestyle, and moved back to Virginia with her daughter. Vermont courts ruled that Jenkins had legal rights as the girl’s parent, but Virginia courts ruled that Vermont had no jurisdiction in the matter. Virginia had passed a constitutional amendment banning civil unions and same-sex marriage.

Liberty Counsel started representing Miller in the custody dispute.

Suddenly, Miller disappeared. Liberty Counsel attempted to contact her, to no avail.

Later, the Obama administration tracked Miller to Nicaragua, where she had fled with her daughter. Juries convicted three men of assisting with international kidnapping in the case. Miller voluntarily returned to the U.S. from Nicaragua in January 2021 after her daughter turned 18. Authorities arrested her on arrival, and she was sentenced to time served after she pleaded guilty in February 2022 to international parental kidnapping.

Jenkins filed a civil lawsuit in 2012, naming Lisa Miller and others, but not suing Liberty Counsel, Staver recalled. In 2016, she amended the complaint, adding Staver, Liberty Counsel, and Miller’s attorney, Rena Lindevaldsen.

Jenkins said in 2016 that she had recently come to suspect that Liberty Counsel had been involved in Miller’s flight from the U.S. In a deposition in January 2024, however, Jenkins said that she had suspected Liberty Counsel’s involvement when she filed the first lawsuit in 2012.

Not only did Judge Sessions rule that there was no evidence Liberty Counsel had assisted in the kidnapping, but he also ruled that the statute of limitations for the case had expired before 2016.

“She lied and she knew she lied,” Staver told The Daily Signal. “She was very strong under oath during her deposition last year.”

“In sum, the testimony of not only the Liberty Counsel attorneys, but also of the three men involved in Isabella’s kidnapping, indicates that Liberty Counsel did not engage in, aid, or abet any conspiracy,” the judge ruled.

Why $200 Billion?

Staver recalled the legal proceeding in which Jenkins demanded $200 billion in damages.

“What about the damages? Who do you expect to pay those?” Staver recalled his attorney asking.

“You, Liberty Counsel,” came Jenkins’ reply.

“She started off with a lower figure,” but increased the number to $200 billion, Staver recalled.

He said she threatened, “If you keep on talking, it’s going to go higher than that.”

“They had no basis for it,” he claimed.

“The whole thing is meant to just harass us and take us down,” Staver added. “Their plot was, if we can get that judgment against them, Liberty Counsel will be no more.”

‘Our Aim In Life Is To Destroy These Groups’

Staver’s claim that the SPLC joined the lawsuit in order to destroy Liberty Counsel may be less far-fetched than it seems at first blush.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s, publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside Klan chapters. The SPLC claims this map reveals the “infrastructure of white supremacy.”

The map includes parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty; pro-enforcement immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform; religious freedom law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom; and conservative Christian think tanks like the Family Research Council. Last year, the SPLC added an LGBTQ group, Gays Against Groomers, to its list of “anti-LGBTQ hate groups,” the same classification it uses to describe Liberty Counsel.

The SPLC has faced a torrent of criticism for these classifications. It has publicly apologized to former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and celebrated neurosurgeon Ben Carson after branding him an extremist for his views on marriage. It has paid $3 million to a Muslim reformer it branded an “anti-Islamic extremist.” In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam” that allowed the SPLC to scare donors into ponying up cash by exaggerating hate.

In 2007, SPLC spokesman Mark Potok said his organization aims to “destroy” the groups on the “hate map.”

“Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them,” Potok declared in Michigan that year.

The next year in Vermont, Potok explained, “You are able to destroy these groups sometimes by the things you publish. It’s not so much that they will bring down the police or the federal agents on their head, it’s that you can sometimes so mortally embarrass these groups that they will be destroyed.”

In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council’s office in Washington, D.C., planning to shoot everyone in the building. A brave staffer foiled his attempt, and he later confessed to using the SPLC’s map to find his target.

Liberty Counsel has joined the legal team for the Dustin Inman Society, a Georgia-based immigration group that sued the SPLC for branding it an “anti-immigrant hate group.” While most defamation lawsuits against the SPLC have failed, this lawsuit made it to the discovery process.

Staver recalled that the SPLC demanded all sorts of documents in the Miller case.

“They wanted everything,” he said. “Had we ever used the word ‘fag’?”

“We don’t ever use the word ‘fag,’ but we did a global search on everything we have, and we came up with one reference to the word ‘fag,’ from the New England Primer printed in the 1600s.” Back then, it wasn’t a slur for gay people, he noted. Instead, it meant “a bundle of sticks or a cigarette.”

“That’s the kind of nonsense that we had to go through,” Staver recalled. He said the case had sucked up 11,000 hours of his team’s time.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Tyler O’Neil.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.