Norman local represents Springfield suing Trump, Vance for ‘eating the cats’ comments

SAM ROYKA

TRANSCRIPT STAFF REPORTER

Civil rights lawyer Subodh Chandra is a 1985 Norman High School graduate who attended Stanford and Yale Law schools and now finds himself embroiled in perhaps the most absurd case in election history.

Chandra is representing Springfield, Ohio against former President Donald Trump and Senator J.D. Vance in the “eating the pets” case.

Trump’s comments in the Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris quickly went viral on social media, in which Trump accused Springfield’s immigrant community members of eating dogs and cats.

“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.

Trump, along with Vance, repeated the accusations again and again for days.

“You can be assured of one thing, if anyone else had induced the level of panic and chaos that Trump and Vance did by persistently and relentlessly disseminating lies, they would have been arrested by now,” Chandra said.

The New York Times quoted the city manager for Springfield as saying that the bizarre misinformation was distorting the city’s narrative in a “disappointing” way. The city of just over 58,000 was known as The Champion City in reference to the invention of a crop harvester pulled by horses,

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Subodh Chandra is a 1985 Norman High School graduate.

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name-branded Champion.

After the debate, the city found itself thrown into chaos.

Chandra, who now runs a law firm based out of Cleveland, Ohio, is a former federal prosecutor who represented the case of Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy killed by police.

In the current case, Chandra is representing the Haitian families of Springfield, Ohio, suing Trump and Vance for their unfounded statements accusing the community of eating pets.

The impact of the false statements included the chaos of 33 bomb threats, the closures of public schools and colleges, as well as “closures and evacuations, threats to the mayor and his family, cancelation of a major public festival, parents having to stop working and take care of their kids at home because schools were canceled and closed and just a broad variety of havoc,” Chandra said.

He said if they had only said the statements once or twice, that would make it different.

“The issue was that they were knowingly saying it when it was false, and doing it persistently in a way, even as the chaos was unfolding and then not stopping, even after our Republican governor and the Republican mayor of Springfield kept telling them that it was false and asking them to stop,” Chandra said.

In Ohio, a statute allowing private citizens to initiate criminal charges assisted in the initializing of this case. When they first filed the case, Chandra’s firm wrote that there were no First Amendment Defenses that Trump or Vance’s attorneys could provide.

This was true, Chandra asserted, “because of the relentlessness and persistence.”

Chandra listed the criminal charges filed.

“Inducing panic, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, disrupting public service, and aggravated menacing, at least as to Trump alone, because of this threat to deport Haitians to Venezuela, a land that they’ve never known and that would necessarily involve violence,” Chandra said.

After some Ohioans have tried to offer First Amendment defenses, Chandra states those defenses have been rejected “in situations that had far less impact than what Trump and Vance did.”

In the next week, they plan to file a mandamus complaint, in which they will ask the Supreme Court of Ohio to bring in a new judge because “these three judges have now been tainted.”

Chandra said he feels he is a “beneficiary of what was a great Norman Public Schools education.”