Lawyer disbarred for 'shocking and outrageous' conduct files $20M suit against ethics committee
A lawyer disbarred last year for using “unacceptably bigoted language” doesn’t give up easily. (Image from Shutterstock)
A lawyer disbarred last year for using “unacceptably bigoted language” doesn’t give up easily.
Lawyer Rahul Dev Manchanda of New York continues to contest the decision in state and federal courts, Law.com reports. And his court filings include some of the same kind of language that led to his disbarment, the article reports.
Now, Manchanda has sued the Attorney Grievance Committee for New York’s First Judicial Department. The April 18 lawsuit seeks $20 million, representing the amount of money that he said he would have made as a lawyer for the next 20 years.
Manchanda’s suit alleges that he was disbarred because he is “a Republican, conservative, Christian values lawyer” who is Indian American. The November 2024 disbarment, he argues, was “a simple, draconian, defamatory, slanderous, libelous death sentence, simply for exercising protected speech.”
Manchanda’s suit asks a federal court to decide whether his disbarment was retaliation for filing requests for investigations and civil rights suits. Many of his complaints stem from court actions in a court battle over his children that caused him to lose contact with them.
Manchanda said he has not spoken with or seen his children since 2017 because of “activist extreme feminist and lesbian judges, racist law clerks, LGBTQ+ and biased court administrators, who routinely would lose his motions, sabotage his filings” and “arbitrarily and capriciously threaten him with contempt or arrest.”
His suits targeted agencies, he wrote, in which “the vast majority of New York City government employees” are “predominantly leftist, communist, Democrat, … of African American descent, with predominantly Jewish supervisors, as well as LGBTQ+ activists and extremists.”
He also described the referee in the ethics case again him as a “biased, broken, morally, physically and mentally unstable old woman.”
Manchanda filed his suit against the grievance committee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, but it has been transferred to the Southern District of New York because it was filed in the wrong district, according to a text order on the docket.
The Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court said in its disbarment order Manchanda had “used racist, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic statements while holding himself out as a well-trained and extremely experienced lawyer” in New York City.
“Words fail to capture the severity and extent of his bigotry,” the disbarment order said. “The conduct here is simply shocking and outrageous.”
After the disbarment order was issued, Manchanda sought an injunction, which was denied in December by New York’s highest court and by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. His request for reinstatement was rejected by New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Rowan Wilson earlier this month.
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