Summary:
- Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals reverses stalking conviction
- Judge Scott Rowland authors unanimous 12-page opinion
- Lon Brandon Meek convicted in Durant, sentenced to three years prison
- Conviction challenged on free speech and evidence grounds
A Texas man spent 15 months in prison in Oklahoma for a crude rant on YouTube about his ex-wife.
Lon Brandon Meek, 45, was released on May 11. He calls what happened to him a miscarriage of justice.
An appeals court now has ruled in his favor, reversing his stalking conviction and ordering his trial judge to dismiss the felony case.
In a precedent-setting unanimous decision, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on July 30 ruled the evidence failed to prove the 2023 video was directed toward Meeks’ ex-wife.
“Instead, the evidence showed a purportedly jilted ex-husband engaging in a drunken rant to an internet audience about his failed marriage and custody situation,” Judge Scott Rowland wrote.
The opinion notes the 39-minute video was posted on a personal YouTube channel and consisted of Meeks reading a letter to the Oklahoma judge who issued a protective order against him.
Meeks also stated the letter is meant for all judges in Bryan County “because maybe y’all need to pay attention to what’s going on in y’all’s county,” the opinion notes. Meeks went off script into tangents as he read the letter, “talking about his ex-wife in unflattering ways.”
“There was no evidence he made any attempt to share the video with his ex-wife,” Rowland wrote in the 12-page opinion. “He neither tagged her nor sent it to her. No evidence showed he made her aware of its existence and she acknowledged she had had no direct contact with or had spoken to Meeks for years.
“She found out about the video when her boss sent her a link to it, and she made the decision to view its content of her own accord.”
A jury convicted Meeks on Feb. 4, 2025, in Durant, where his ex-wife lives. Jurors recommended five years in prison as punishment. His trial judge ordered him to prison for three years and put him on probation for two.
District Court Judge Mark Campbell dismissed the case on July 30 after the conviction was reversed.
In its opinion on July 30, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals said the state’s anti-stalking law is designed to protect a person from unwanted conduct directed toward them, “not to censor someone from randomly talking negatively about … a party to others.”
“We are not indifferent to the embarrassment and harmful emotional toll being the subject of a spiteful rant concerning one’s personal life can have, especially in such a public forum as YouTube,” Rowland wrote.
The court acknowledged that Meeks also had challenged his conviction on free speech grounds.
“This is an interesting constitutional question, but one we need not settle in this case,” Rowland, a former journalist, wrote.
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, had urged the court to throw out the conviction on First Amendment grounds.
Meeks was accused in the stalking charge of repeatedly posting online videos designed to harass his ex-wife even though he had been told in a 2020 protective order “to cease this type of conduct.” He was charged in Oklahoma even though the 2023 video was posted in Texas.
Attorneys for the state argued in the appeal that Meeks had an overarching goal of plaguing his ex-wife “for the rest of eternity, as he put it.”
“The YouTube video at issue was posted in furtherance of that goal,” they argued.
The ex-wife testified at the trial that he had harassed her in other ways after she got the protective order against him.
“He was texting my family members. He posted … 220 or so Facebook posts that reference me or my children, or subliminal messages to me or my children, or posting pictures of me, or talking graphically about my body, or, you know, about … saying that I kidnapped his child and that I was a rapist.”
Meeks and his ex-wife divorced in 2019. They have a daughter together.
He claims in the 2023 video and in other statements that he has not been able to see his daughter for years because of fraud and a courthouse conspiracy against him. He claims the conspiracy arose in part because his ex-wife worked for and is now married to an attorney.
Meeks put the 2023 video back on his YouTube channel after the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled on July 30. He had been required as a condition of his probation to take it down.
He said he has been trying since his release from prison to get a job as a maintenance man at an apartment complex, which is what he had done before.
“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s sort of like a pedophile trying to get a job at a day care, whenever you’re a stalker trying to get a job at an apartment complex where families live.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: “Oklahoma court tosses conviction of YouTuber who went to prison for online rant”
Reporting by Nolan Clay, The Oklahoman / Oklahoman
