Don’t Mess With Netflix: Lone Star State D.A. Loses ‘Cuties’ Battle With Streamer Over Child Porn Claims, Again

deadline.com:

Tyler County District Attorney Lucas Babin came short in federal court a year ago in his attempt to hit Netflix with child pornography charges over the controversial Cuties, and now an appeals court has handed the former School of Rock actor another defeat and the streamer another win. “We do not take accusations of prosecutorial bad faith or harassment lightly,” wrote 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Don R.

Willett today of the case from the Woodville, TX-based prosecutor “Nor, absent extraordinary circumstances, are we inclined to exercise our jurisdiction in a way that interferes with ongoing state-court proceedings, he added in a 28-page order from himself and two other judges in Netflix’s favor (read the Cuties appeals court ruling here). “But the injunction is preliminary, our review is deferential, and existing Supreme Court precedent has calibrated the principles of equity and federalism in a way that authorized the district court’s intervention.

For these reasons, the judgment below must be AFFIRMED.” Long story short-ish, Babin first went after the Sundance winning coming-of-age drama Cuties back on September 2020 with a grand jury indictment and hasn’t shown signs of giving up since.

At the time, ex-Young and the Restless performer (for real) Babin slammed the streamer for “knowingly promote visual material which depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was created, which appeals to the prurient interest in sex, and has no serious, literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” For the record, the Maïmouna Doucouré-directed Cuties centers on an 11-year-old Senegalese-French