State party tangled up in lawsuit
Have you ever had a check bounce, or had one of your credit cards declined?
The answer is probably yes. But I’m guessing that you didn’t then file a lawsuit demanding $5-6 million in damages because of the “torture” that you suffered from this “most outrageous” and “unbelievable” atrocity that ever happened to you.
But then, you’re not Jim “Jones” Lyons, the 69-year-old crackpot former chairman of the Massachusetts GOP state committee.
In statewide elections, Lyons went zero for both 2020 and 2022, losing every single major race and referendum. He made the GOP into a political death cult, turning a $700,000 surplus when he took over in 2019 into a $600,000 deficit as he was ejected in ignominy six weeks ago.
Now he’s filed one of the most frivolous lawsuits of all time – Jim Jones Lyons vs. his own committee treasurer, Patrick Crowley, a CPA from Worcester.
The lawsuit is worth mentioning today because it will soon be dismissed. The same state committee that ousted Lyons for his singlehanded demolition of the two-party system in Massachusetts is now refusing to fund his continuing lawsuit against Crowley.
Briefly, in February 2022 Crowley froze the party’s bank account. But as chairman, Lyons had the right to authorize any expenditures he wanted. So the “torture” of having the rent check bounce and the credit card problem, was, well, somewhat less than apocalyptic.
As Crowley’s lawyer asked at the deposition: “Was the committee able to make whatever rent payment was due?”
Jim Jones Lyons: “We did make it.”
Lawyer: “Did any employees miss any pay?”
Lyons: “No.”
Lawyer: “And is it also true of the State Committee employees’ benefits, that they all received their benefits?”
Lyons: “That’s correct.”
But somehow, he claims, the alleged fundraising of the Mass GOP was affected. Which is why Lyons was demanding $5-6 million in damages from Crowley
And Lyons has filed other lawsuits against different Republicans because of “the torture that these people put me through… I mean, the torture I guess is emotional distress, I guess, is the way that I would describe it. The impact that it had on me.”
Lawyer: “Have you sought any treatment for the emotional distress?”
Lyons: “No, I haven’t. No, I haven’t.”
The new lawyer for the committee, Brian Kelly, the former federal prosecutor who convicted Whitey Bulger, just recommended dropping the lawsuit, which Lyons was funding through a related GOP fund to pay for legal expenses.
His lawyer, David Carr, has grabbed $25,000 out of that fund, in addition to another $17,000 he pocketed out of the failed Question 4 fund, which still owes $45,000 to other creditors.
The lawsuit is pretty much over. But the 250-page deposition Lyons gave last November shows just how completely his Kool Aid Kult destroyed the Mass GOP for a generation with their insane paranoid vendettas against fellow Republicans.
Lyons has “flashbacks,” he says. He reads something and blurts out that a committee member “is part of the conspiracy.” (That’s why he spent $1,000 in GOP funds to send private detectives after her.)
On page 227 Crowley’s lawyer asks Lyons how he knows that Crowley was involved in this vast “concocted scheme” to somehow get him. Lyons goes full Capt. Queeg:
“Now we have the documents that link them all together in one place in April of 2021… So I believe that everybody that is involved in that scheme – a guy went to jail because he sent me emails because of the guy that tried to torture me. That guy sent me emails on behest of this guy. He went to jail for that. So Crowley is definitely part of the team.”
In the deposition, Lyons calls Crowley “crazy” more than a dozen times, not to mention a “lunatic,” a “total moron” and “out of his mind.”
Finally, after hours of Lyons’ armchair psychiatry, on page 247 Crowley’s lawyer asked him the obvious question:
“You don’t have any medical degrees, do you?”
Lyons: “No sir.”
Lyons scares easily, as he admitted repeatedly. At one point, Crowley, a veteran, was trying to send his son a photo of himself in combat gear holding an AR-15. He sent one to Lyons by mistake.
Everybody’s seen photos like that. Everybody except, apparently, Jim Lyons. He had his lawyer run into court looking for a restraining order against Crowley. He hysterically emailed the state committee about the mistaken photo.
“That was frightening,” Lyons said under oath, “and I wanted the state committee to know that he had frightened me.”
Lawyer: “Do you find a photograph of a United States serviceperson to be offensive?”
Yes, he did. If you frighten as easily as Jim Jones Lyons, it is a scary world out there. And for Jim Jones Lyons, it just got a lot scarier. He and his 65-year-old wife Bernadette have a tiny ice cream-floral shop in Tewksbury. It’s called Dandi-Lyons.
Guess what happened? While Lyons was busy these last few years taking a wrecking ball to the state Republican party, somebody moved in across the street and applied to open a… marijuana dispensary.
Considering how petrified Lyons is by internet snapshots and bounced checks, can you imagine how much he and Bernadette must dread the thought of a parking lot across the street full of dirty hippies in their day-glo buses, holding hands and wearing sandals and chanting, “All we are saying, is give peace a chance!”
As you can see from his deposition, geriatric Lyons often babbles incoherently, especially if he thinks he’s being “tortured.” He went to a meeting of the Tewksbury Planning Board to protest the weed emporium, and the chairman finally had to tell the garrulous old geezer to stick to the subject.
At this point, Bernadette Lyons rose from her chair in horror. Are these hippies going to be smoking… muggles… across the street from the Lyons’ God-fearing soft ice-cream stand?
“What is it, recreational marijuana?” Jim Lyons’ wife bleated. “Are they going to be able to use it, like, in their cars?”
What a terrible prospect for two of Ted Cruz’s biggest fans! The only way it could be worse is if the hippie doing a bone in the car was in combat fatigues, and it was Pat Crowley.
Hasn’t he tortured Jim Jones Lyons enough?