A federal defamation lawsuit filed by Connecticut resident Christopher A. Ambrose against me is facing a jurisdictional challenge in the U.S. District Court for Connecticut.
Ambrose alleges that I defamed him through a series of online articles and seeks $5 million in damages. Because I do not reside or work in Connecticut, the case depends on whether the court can exercise personal jurisdiction over me.
In opposing my motion to dismiss based on jurisdiction, Ambrose argued that I targeted Connecticut readers to create a special kind of jurisdiction. He says I focus on Connecticut because I write about it all the time; therefore, there’s jurisdiction.
As evidence, Ambrose told the court in his December 8, 2025 filing that I wrote the word “Connecticut” 1,332 times in “the 34 articles at issue.”
That’s 39 times per story. That would not be journalistically reasonable, and, if true, it would demonstrate an obsession with the word.
In my reply brief filed on December 23, 2025, I had to dispute that figure, not merely to dispute it. I tried to be polite. I stated that Ambrose made minor mistakes: One, there are not 34 stories at issue—like he says in his lawsuit—but only 21, since the other 13 he mentions were written by someone else. A minor error, easy to make and forgivable, but nevertheless mildly problematic since it is established in law you cannot sue a man for defamation for something someone else wrote.
It sounds unfair, but it is the way it is. If I write, “You’re a stinker,” perhaps because of a lack of bathing, you cannot sue your mother-in-law for defamation.
But the more obvious mathematical error was Ambrose’s counting of the times I wrote the word Connecticut.
He said 1,332 times. That would be like writing Connecticut 39 times in every 800-word story.
Yes, Ambrose counted 1,332 times, but a simple review of the actual stories shows it to be slightly inaccurate. In the 21 stories that I wrote which Ambrose is suing me for defamation over, the word Connecticut appears 82 times, about four times per story. Let me try to catch up.
A Connecticut Story About a Connecticut Man in Connecticut
In March 2025, a Connecticut man and former television writer, Christopher Ambrose, who lives in Connecticut, (also known as a Connecticuter) but wrote many of his fictional scripts outside Connecticut, filed a federal defamation lawsuit in Connecticut against Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist and author who does not live in Connecticut, except sometimes when she is visiting Connecticut, but likes Connecticut. Connecticut is known as the Nutmeg State.
Ambrose, writing from Madison, Connecticut, claims Lee defamed him by publicly accusing him of child abuse, which he did in various places in Connecticut. His kids live in Connecticut or lived in Connecticut. Connecticut is also known as the Constitution State. Most people agree Connecticut is nice because the Constitution is nice, though it is unclear if Connecticut’s nickname, the Constitution State, means the Connecticut Constitution or the U.S. Constitution, which if nobody noticed before, the word Connecticut and the word Constitution are pretty similar—they both start with C and they have four syllables.
Dr. Lee, from outside of Connecticut, previously said her application of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist scored Connecticut resident Ambrose 32 out of 40—two points above the clinical threshold for psychopathy, which is high even for Connecticut.
In Connecticut there seems to be a lot of t residents (Connecticutians) who think Connecticut produces more than their fair share of psychopaths, including several Connecticut residents who are Connecticut family court judges who both live in Connecticut and sit on the bench in Connecticut, and were born in Connecticut, and have already purchased from Connecticut cemeteries plots of land for burial in Connecticut, where many Connecticut residents (Connecticotians) plan to do the same: get themselves born in Connecticut, live in Connecticut, love Connecticut, enjoy Connecticut, and die in Connecticut because Connecticut is a great place to live and connect. People who live in Conncecticut (Connecticutensians) also call Connecticut, the Nutmeg State—because in Connecticut, Connect over a cup of Connecticut hot chocolate, with nutmeg. As for me, I have never yet set foot inside Connecticut.
The end
Ambrose, a former writer of creative fiction for television, usually in the crime genre, is not liable for a slight error. In TV drama, especially crime, one has to enlarge the facts to make the crimes more dramatic, and I think we can all agree that mentioning Connecticut four times per story is not as impressive as 39 times per story.
What makes it dramatic is the figure of 1,332. It’s good, it’s impressive, it’s fiction at its best. It’s literary license. It always worked in TV court scenes.
To penalize Ambrose now for doing what he always does seems a bit unfair, but judges in real life do not always behave the way they do on television.
A judge might just think he lied. But lying for a TV writer is not the same as lying for you and I. He had to lie, for fiction is lying in a sense, and whether he writes fiction for TV or fiction for court, to him it is all the same.
Maybe he will get away with it, but there is a chance he will not.
A Buffalo Story
Where I mention Buffalo 1335 times.
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” as any good grammarian knows, is grammatically correct and meaningful. I know I’m from Buffalo.
