Jack Thompson once pasted a caped crusader over his own driver’s license, photocopied it, and mailed it to judges and opposing lawyers to prove he was a real-life crime fighter. This episode charts the rise and fall of the Florida attorney who spent two decades waging war on rap music, MTV and violent video games, only to be permanently disbarred in 2008 and, in a 2024 interview, praise games as an educational tool.

Drawing on court transcripts, bar disciplinary records and archived news coverage, we follow Thompson from his $200 million lawsuit against Miami radio host Neil Rogers and his bizarre 1988 campaign against Janet Reno, through his attacks on 2 Live Crew and Madonna, to his central theory that violent games were not speech but dangerous appliances that trained children to kill. We examine why the Miller test and the legal concept of proximate cause doomed his lawsuits, including the Heath High School case, and how cable news kept booking him despite wrong predictions about the Beltway sniper and a university shooting. Finally we look at the charity donation made in his name, the flowers he rejected, and the courtroom conduct that ended his career.

• The 40,000 recorded radio mentions behind a $200 million lawsuit
• The Florida Supreme Court psychiatric evaluation he passed and wore as a badge of honor
• Why courts refused to treat games as defective products or ban albums for offensive lyrics
• The gag order violation in Alabama and the explicit imagery sent to a federal judge
• Disbarment, over $40,000 in fines, teaching civics to prison inmates, and the 2024 reversal