By: Ryan Kurniawan

When you hear “sue” the first thing that probably comes to mind is Donald Trump suing Hillary Clinton for Russian collusion allegations, or back in 2019 during the cringeworthy lawsuit between Apple and Epic Games over microtransaction rights. Most of the time, it is between large companies, or popular people, but what if I told you that in late 2020, while school was hosted completely online, The Thunderbolt published an illegal online article featuring the Tokyo olympics. 

In this article, Senior Staff Writer Ruby Red wrote about how politicized the Olympics are by participating countries. In this article, the writer goes into detail about how athletes are treated by their governments after victories, or losses. However, embedded in that article was a photo of Chinese participant Liu Changchun preparing for his 40 yard swim competition, which at the time was believed to be a stock photo. Unknown to the Mills Thunderbolt team, it in fact was not a stock photo, and within the next four weeks, Mr. Hensley, our school newspaper advisor, received a $200,000 dollar lawsuit by Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the largest newspaper companies in Japan. The article was hastily taken down, but the lawsuit was ignored. From that day forward, every image embedded in articles was individually and thoroughly investigated to make sure that this never happened again and pictures carefully chosen.

 All was going well for a couple months, until disaster struck. On March 23, 2022, our advisor received a second email warning us of our violation for a Cease and Desist, and that action will be taken since we have already violated the second request. Unsure how we violated a second cease and desist request, the Mills high school thunderbolt has hired a lawyer in an attempt to combat the lawsuit. Due to our already low budget, our poor sales during the past Mills Manias, and our low return rate on our newspaper subscription service, the Mills Thunderbolt has decided to not publish any more physical paper articles for the rest of the 2022 school year in an attempt to save money to pay for legal expenses. On top of that, the source for our printed newspapers, the San Francisco Examiner Media company, as well as JASK Digital printing, have also refused to print anymore of our newspapers, claiming in an email sent to our Editor-in-Chief that they did not want to be associated with “Lazy plagiarizing highschoolers”, and that they do not want to be involved in any way with the lawsuit from Yomiuri Shimbun. In addition, due to the terms of the cease and desist, The Mills Thunderbolt may also be forced to close down in order to prevent further criminalization. 

The Mills Thunderbolt team would like to thank all its readers for supporting this newspaper for a long and grueling 64 years. Since 1958, The Thunderbolt has provided the Mills High School student body, Millbrae community, and the county as a whole with reliable and accurate information. We cover issues that plague our school, county, and city and put it all in a newspaper that is accessible to anyone and everyone at mills. For this, we would like to request a kind donation of $20 per student in order to cover all legal fees arising from this lawsuit. 

With great sadness and shame we would also like to apologize to all former members of the Mills Thunderbolt for ruining decades of progress. On the bright side, the Mills Thunderbolt can go down in history as the first high school newspaper to be sued out of existence.

Sincerely, The Mills Thunderbolt Team, 2022.