Loathed Aussie mining magnate Clive Palmer punts libel sueball at YouTube comedian

A four-month-old video has been dredged up and given a massive publicity boost thanks to legal threats sent by Australian would-be politician Clive Palmer to YouTube comedian Jordan Shanks.

The video (which we'd link to if it hadn't been taken down) was posted back in May when Palmer was throwing vast amounts of money at trying to win a seat in Parliament Down Under. Palmer spent A$60m ($40m) on advertising for his Make Australia Great campaign – only to not win any seats at all.

In a letter to the comedian, Palmer's lawyer, Sam Iskander, said Shanks' description of his client as "Fatty McFuckhead" and "a dense Humpty Dumpty" was defamatory and demanded $500,000 in damages.

Shanks released a follow-up video providing what he describes as evidence for the accuracy of this description including video clips of Palmer describing himself as fat and one clip where, as Shanks notes, "Palmer snores while he's awake."

Shanks further attempts to bolster his case with a clip of Palmer's MP, Ewen Jones, saying it'd be unlikely that anyone would cross the road to spit on Palmer if he was on fire.

Continuing to take Iskander back to law school, Shanks explains that defamation requires proof that he has substantially damaged or lowered Palmer's reputation with the public.

It should be noted that he includes a clip of Palmer attending a football match while the crowd chants "Fuck off Palmer." He also points out that a reasonable person would not conclude that calling the mining magnate a "dense Humpty Dumpty" meant that he was actually a fictional egg-shaped character from a nursery rhyme.

He then outlines some of Palmer's better-known antics, including withholding staff pay unless they agreed to sign "don't be rude about Clive Palmer" letters and claiming environmentalists are funded by the CIA.

The video would likely have died quietly, but the legal shenanigans put it on the front page of Reddit yesterday and by today even the BBC had woken up to it. Googling "Fatty McFuckhead" now returns several hundred pages relating to Clive Palmer. ®