Exxxotica's attorney Roger Albright was at the council's regularly scheduled meeting today, hoping that the council would move to reconsider the ban on the convention. None of the eight people who voted for the ban — Rawlings, Adam McGough, Jennifer Gates, Erik Wilson, Carolyn Arnold, Tiffinni Young, Casey Thomas or Rickey Callahan — made a motion to do so, so Albright made good on the promise he made in his Tuesday letter to Rawlings.
After the meeting adjourned, Exxxotica's official account tweeted a running man emoji next to a courthouse emoji, and a couple of hours later the suit was on the books. As Exxxotica says in a statement, there's no going back now:
"It is important to recognize that once this lawsuit is filed, it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. It will likely cost the City of Dallas and its taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, in legal fees and damages. This is on top of the already filed potential class action lawsuit filed [Monday] in Federal District Court in Texas."
Council members who voted against the ban aren't defendants in the suit, but that doesn't mean they aren't upset about the city getting sued.
"Our best defense strategy will be to give up as fast as possible," council member Philip Kingston, who vociferously opposed the ban, said on Facebook.
During discussion about the potential ban, Rawlings said it wasn't appropriate for the city to "hide behind judges' robes" and allow the expo to go ahead for fear that banning it violated the First Amendment. Since February 10, the day he said that, the city has been sued twice — by Exxxotica and Chino Salas, a resident looking forward to the convention after being a vendor at Exxxotica 2015 — and faces the specter of Adultcon, an Exxxotica competitor, having filed for space at the publicly available convention center. Rawlings, it seems, is going to be seeing a lot of those judges' robes.
