My name is Anthony Novak and I was arrested and charged
with a felony for parodying my police department on Facebook.
The idea to parody them came to me, just kind of on a whim.
I was at the bus stop boredd after I had left work and I
was waiting for the bus to come so I could go home and
it popped in my head and I went well, this'll be funny.
The page looked like the Parma Police Department
Facebook page, but the posts itself were clearly satire
and different parody posts that were just ridiculous.
Tuesday will be our official stay inside and catch up
with a family day in Parma.
The Parma Police Department has set this day to a allow
families to come together in an effort to reduce future
crime by having children have a well balanced communication
with their families.
Anyone seen outside of their home from the hours of 12:00
PM to 9:00 PM will be arrested.
Thank you.
Some people I'm sure were confused about it, but most
people responded to the fact that it's clearly a parody.
Parma Police Department did not like my page.
By the end of the day, they were on the local
television news talking about the actual Facebook page.
People are all a buzz in Parma after someone created
a fake Facebook page for the city's police department.
It was real crazy.
That's why just stay offline, watch your kids.
Watch what they surf on the web.
We became aware of this, uh, uh, fake Facebook page, uh,
purporting to be the official Facebook page of the Parma
Police Department uh, earlier this morning, Lieutenant Kevin
Riley with the Parma Police Department says detectives
contacted Facebook and asked them to remove the fake
page as soon as possible.
The police had never contacted me at all about the page.
The, uh, postings and the materials on there I don't want
to get into discussing them in detail, but frankly they're
crude, they're demeaning and they're very inflammatory.
Our concern right now is public safety.
After that, I immediately took down the page.
So three weeks after I took the page down, I was leaving
a store around midnight, on Good Friday with my roommate,
and a cop car pulled up and I even looked at my roommate and
said, "Someone's in trouble."
The cop came out of the car and looked at me
and said, Anthony Novak?
Fake Parma Police Facebook page.
And I said, what?
It was me, I was in trouble.
They took me to the police department.
They booked me and they told me I was charged with
disrupting public services.
So when I woke up in jail, I opened my eyes kind of
confused and processing the situation and I thought, wow,
I really screwed up here.
And then I remembered, wait, I didn't actually
do anything wrong.
I found out about the search of my apartment when I was on
the phone, actually with my mother while I was in jail.
So, and they ended up taking anything that could
connect to the internet.
They took my laptop, my roommate's laptop.
They took hard drives.
They took game consoles.
They took phones.
They tried to take my roommate's guns even that
don't connect to the internet.
They said that after I made the page uh, a few people called the
police mostly to tell them the page existed, if not entirely.
And they said just since people called the non-emergency
line to inform them of the page's existence, that
that somehow meant that I disrupted public services.
When the jury came back and said not guilty, it was like
a 50 pound weight I didn't even know was on my shoulders
was immediately taken off.
And I, and my attorneys all yelled, YEAH.
The First Amendment protects everyone's right to criticize
and poke fun of the government.
I felt it was necessary to sue them because they clearly,
clearly were offended.
They raided my house, they took my electronics.
My mugshot was blasted all over the news and I didn't do
anything wrong and I can't let them think that that's okay.
They dismissed my case against the officers for violating my
First Amendment right, so now I'm appealing to the Supreme
Court to make sure these officers are held accountable,
so they can't do this to anyone else in the future.
The police shouldn't be able to arrest you for making
a joke at their expense.