‘Call Rafi’ lawyer doubles down in defamation suit against rival

Brandon Rafi, the personal injury attorney whose face adorns billboards and bus stops all over the Valley, is not backing down in his court battle against rival Gil Negrete, the suspended attorney that Rafi is suing for defamation.

The case concerns the anonymous Instagram account @LawyerFiles — which has been taken offline since Phoenix New Times last reported on the case — that Rafi claims made defamatory posts about him and his firm, Rafi Law Group. Included in court documents submitted by Rafi attorney Raees Mohamed, the posts say Rafi needed his father’s money to start his firm and that he and his staff of attorneys lack meaningful experience in court. The suit also accuses whoever is behind the account of engineering a break-in attempt at Rafi’s home and making a fake bomb threat to one of RLG’s offices.

The suit initially was filed in February with no named defendant but was updated in May to accuse Negrete of being behind the Instagram account as well as the bomb threat and break-in attempt. Negrete then lambasted the suit and Rafi on his “Call Gil Show” podcast, denying his involvement while taking several shots at Rafi both on his show and in an interview with Phoenix New Times.

However, a second amended complaint filed last month added some heft to one of Rafi’s claims against Negrete. According to the filing, a subpoena of Instagram revealed that a cell phone number belonging to Negrete was used to log into the @LawyerFiles account. Additionally, the amended complaint said that Negrete has used the number in question to correspond directly with Rafi “over the course of several years.”

Mohamed did not respond to a request for comment from New Times.

When he first spoke to New Times in July, Negrete was cagey about his involvement with the @LawyerFiles account, claiming he was not behind it but knew who was. He also jokingly suggested he might buy the account to further antagonize Rafi. But last month, when New Times contacted him again to ask if it was true that his phone number is tied to the account, Negrete said, “Well, apparently.”

That number is one of the roughly 13 on his wireless plan, Negrete said, adding it’s one “I’ve used from time to time as a backup number.” As for how it became associated with an account with which he claims no association, Negrete said his advertising business runs “like eight different Instagram pages” that are tied to his number and it’s possible that “somebody may have used one of the phones to create that account.” He maintains that he is not behind the @LawyerFiles account.

“I did not create Lawyer Files, and I did not post those statements about Brandon or those stories about Brandon,” Negrete said.

Bomb threat claim

Negrete also has maintained he had nothing to do with the February bomb threat made to RLG’s location on 24th Street. As New Times reported in July, Phoenix police determined that a sixth-grader at Maryvale Preparatory sent the bomb threat via a chatbot on RLG’s website and that an RLG employee was made aware of that fact months before the lawsuit claimed Negrete did it instead.

Instead of dropping that accusation from the suit against Negrete, Rafi instead doubled down in the latest version of his complaint. In a footnote, the complaint states that “Plaintiffs are informed that a police reports (sic) states that a sixth grader at Maryvale Preparatory Academy made this bomb threat to RLG.” However, the footnote continued, “the police report contained inaccuracies.” It did not specify what those inaccuracies were.

The footnote plays up Negrete’s association with Maryvale and attempts to tie him directly to the bomb threat by citing IP addresses used to log into the @LawyerFiles account. “The IP address included in one of the bomb threat communications matches the geolocation of at least two of the IP addresses used to log into the Lawyer Files,” the complaint states.

However, according to Loehrs Forensics owner Michele Bush, that allegation rests on particularly shaky ground. For one, the complaint alleges that there was a login to the Instagram account from the bomb threat’s origin, but it does not claim that the login occurred at the same time. Furthermore, Bush said, “geolocation” — which the complaint does not define — can be a nearly meaningless metric. It can mean “a thousand miles,” she said, or as little as “3 miles, maybe 5 miles.”

“There are probably a million people who are using an IP address within the same geographic location,” Bush said. “If that’s all they’re doing, saying, ‘This is a (Maryvale) IP address and so is the swatting event,’ that to me is a very loose association and in no way identifies any particular individual or entity.”

Negrete forcefully denied any association with the bomb threat, the police response to which was photographed and posted on the @LawyerFiles account. “I said this then and I say it now: To still stand by that accusation is fraudulent,” Negrete said. “There’s no evidence I was anywhere near that school.”

Rafi’s latest complaint seemed to recognize the shakiness of the claim. In the same footnote that claimed there were “inaccuracies” in the police report about the bomb threat, the complaint signaled it could drop the bomb threat accusation altogether.

“Plaintiffs maintain Defendant Negrete’s involvement,” the footnote concluded, “until discovery proves otherwise.”

What happens next

The next step in the case will be for Negrete and his attorney, Geoffrey Sturr, to file an answer responding to the new allegations. When asked if there had been substantive settlement talks between him and Rafi, Negrete said, “No. Well … um … not really, no.”

Negrete also is still trying to determine who is behind the website WhoIsGilNegrete.com, which chronicles the run-ins with the State Bar of Arizona that left him suspended as well as a 2011 misdemeanor conviction for facilitation to commit money laundering. Negrete said he and Sturr want to unmask who is running the site and “can’t get further in a subpoena until disclosures” in the case with Rafi.

Since New Times last reported on it, the website has added a grainy video of Negrete yelling at someone at a car show and text threads and photos of what the website claims was Negrete’s “side chick.” When asked if he had any comment on those allegations, Negrete said, “No. Nothing.”

But Negrete was willing to opine on his opponent’s legal strategy. While much of the intrigue about the case concerns who was doing what, Negrete thinks Rafi’s attorney “is doing him a disservice” when it comes to the defamation claim itself. At several points, the complaint underscores Rafi’s fame in the Valley, calling his business a “massive success” and noting that Rafi’s “brand name and image are widely known throughout Arizona” due to Rafi’s advertising campaigns.

That would seem to cast Rafi as a public figure, for whom there is a higher legal standard to prove defamation. Public figures, which can include business, must prove defamatory statements were made with “actual malice” — meaning whoever made the statement knew it was false or made it with “reckless disregard for the truth.”

“He would be doing right by him if he were to say, ‘You know what, Brandon Rafi is not a public figure. He’s a normal guy, a normal private citizen, and Gil defamed him,’” Negrete said. “Instead, he’s like, ‘Gil defamed this guy who’s wrapped all over Phoenix.’”

As a suspended lawyer, Negrete cannot offer legal advice. But maybe that one will sneak by.