An Orange County man who accused Anaheim cops of committing police brutality during a 2010 animal rights protest of Ringling Brothers Circus at the Honda Center has won a settlement from the city before a federal jury could consider the case.
In his 2011 lawsuit, Bryan Monell claimed that he was videotaping the arrest of another protester when officer Christopher Pena got upset that his actions were being recorded, tackled Monell, caused a serious injury, confiscated the camera and then locked him in jail for more than 26 hours by falsely accusing him of interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest.
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Monell, who has protested animal cruelty hundreds of times without
incident, suffered “a gash in his neck that required hospitalization and
stitches,” according to the lawsuit that also accused officers Jonathan Kirkpatrick and Angelica Mejia of violating his rights.
Federal
court records show that Monell received undisclosed damages in exchange
for him dropping the lawsuit that would have been heard in U.S.
District Court Judge James V. Selna's Santa Ana courtroom.
A four-day trial had been scheduled for October.
Go HERE to read the Weekly's Matt Coker previously report on animal cruelty questions at the circus.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.