The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano has spoken out after winning his defamation lawsuit against Falling In Reverse’s Ronnie Radke.
In 2024, the singer filed the suit against the YouTube music critic, claiming that in a video posted the previous year under the title ‘This Guy Sucks’, Fantano had “acted in malice” and “engaged in fraud”.
In May, a judge in Connecticut ruled in Fantano’s favour, dismissing the suit under the state’s anti-SLAPP statute on matters of public concern. Radke was also ordered to pay Fantano’s legal fees.
In a 16-minute video posted to his YouTube channel this week, Fantano publicly addressed the ruling for the first time. Opening by blowing up a balloon with the words “I won” written on it, he said: “It’s time for a review of a lawsuit that was recently filed against me and was hilariously dismissed”.
“I didn’t want to blow this up into something bigger than it needed to be,” he said, explaining his silence on the issue up until this point. “And also on top of it, I didn’t want to give the person who was suing me the satisfaction of maybe seeing me squirm or for him to have the capacity to read into anything that I’m doing or saying or cause more of a fuss over this.”
He went on to give his take on the protracted legal process of the case, explaining that Radke’s legal team had initially sued the wrong Anthony Fantano, and even when they did serve the suit to the correct Fantano, they still listed his wrong middle initial.
He spoke about enacting the anti-SLAPP clause, explaining that he believed it allowed him to exercise his “free speech” and “journalistic rights”, arguing that the suit had only been filed in the first place “to silence me, essentially”.
thank you for paying my legal fees, ronald ❤️
— Anthony Fantano from TheNeedleDrop (@theneedledrop) August 28, 2025
Fantano stressed that he felt it was important to defend himself fully and not settle out of court. “While, yeah it was not super positive, it was kind of necessary,” he said. “There is a seriously important historical precedent to this decision because there’s not a whole lot of lawsuits quite like this one in the modern era where someone in the music commentary space is having to defend themselves.”
“I can’t just allow this to quietly settle in his favor or anything like that. That’s going to send the message that anybody who hates me can essentially pull up with lawyers anytime I say something they don’t like and shut me down entirely. Honestly, fuck that.”
Radke posted his own 15-minute response video to the judge’s ruling, which you can also watch above.
Fantano and Radke first feuded in public on X/Twitter over Fantano’s review of the Falling In Reverse single ‘Watch The World Burn’ in February 2023. Five months later, Fantano posted the aforementioned video, in which he brought up a range of allegations made against Radke over the years. The singer has faced legal issues including a 2006 battery conviction that led to prison time, a 2012 domestic violence arrest and a dismissed 2015 sexual assault allegation.
The singer’s legal team said that Fantano’s posting went “outside the bounds of permissible commentary and extends well into the realm of actionable innuendo, unfounded rumormongering and outright untruth.”
Elsewhere, Fantano recently apologised for past racial slurs and controversial comments after historic clips were resurfaced by podcaster DJ Akademiks. He argued that some of the videos had been presented out of context, while Drake took the chance to mock the critic as a result.