Asking Twice: Is ZeroDarkTony’s Legal Fund a Double Billing Scheme?

California law does not necessarily let someone recover a legal fee twice, once from an audience that already paid it, and once from an opponent ordered to pay it again, and nothing in the fee motion accounts for the first payment.

HeroNotZero reviewed over a year of D’Amato’s own broadcasts, a financial reconstruction of his channel’s public fundraising going back to June 2025, and the fee declaration itself. What they show together is not a single statement taken out of context. It is a pattern, repeated across different legal matters, all involving anti-scientology protestors, stretching back roughly a year before this case was filed: D’Amato asking viewers to fund his legal costs, and in the same breath, telling them the people he was suing would pay those costs back, culminating in a sworn declaration that asks a court to award those same costs a second time.

We found no evidence of Zero Dark Tony promising reimbursement to his funders.

EXHIBIT A: THE ASK, AND WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

September 18, 2025.

[Original Video: youtube.com/watch?v=k1NCWUr-DmU]

“She’s going to reimburse me, by the way, for the searches that I’ve had to do. She’s going to have to reimburse the expense for the subpoenas. And just so you know, obviously, I have to pay for the subpoenas, that’s part of the legal fund. So, understand that you guys donating to the legal fund and donating to the subpoena service… So, one hour, 10 super chat challenge, $5 each to contribute towards the subpoena fund, because well it’s just part of the legal fund, it’s just an additional expense, you know, and we’ve already put funds toward that, but again, not cheap, but they will reimburse.”

This passage concerns a different target of D’Amato’s, Mindy Willens. It shows his method: in D’Amato’s own words, donations and reimbursement are not two separate things. They are the same fund, described in the same sentence, by the person running it.

What happened immediately afterward, according to the broadcast’s own transcript, is the clearest evidence in this entire record that the ask worked as described. Within thirteen minutes, D’Amato is heard acknowledging at least four separate donors on air, including one he explicitly counted: “Super Chat number three, coming in hot.”

D’Amato was not describing a hypothetical. He ran the fundraiser live, and he counted the results live, immediately after telling his audience the other side would pay it back.

The other side did not pay it back. In this case, the subpoenas were all quashed for amounting to a fishing expedition, the judge concerned about the reasons, said the attorney better explain himself. He didn’t. No brief like the judge asked for. The attorney was sanctioned. The subpoenas basically amounted to harassment subpoenas aimed at getting personal information from several of Zero Dark Tony’s unrelated targets.

EXHIBIT B: THE METHOD

March 29, 2025.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpD8EHo_YG4]

“…take me to court. And then you’ll pay my legal fees for wasting the time of the court…”

Speaking to his target Mindy Willens here, he dares her to take him to court. He threatens her that she will pay his legal fees.

July 13, 2025

[Original Video: youtube.com/watch?v=VB0-sceD0jM]

“She’s going to have to pay an exorbitant amount of legal fees, because that’s what I have to do, I have to pay legal fees in order to protect myself. She is going to pay my legal fees. So that’s what’s going to happen.”

Six months before the earliest statement above, and eleven months before the July statement, D’Amato had not yet filed against Brooks. He filed his first petition against Brooks in September 2025. That one failed. The current action followed in March 2026. The method he describes here predates both by a wide margin, and he describes it as a general practice, not a plan specific to any one person.

In other coverage, we’ve shown how D’Amato also used financial threats against a minor and his family. The minor and family have a restraining order against D’Amato, which D’Amato violated, and is currently serving probation, albeit currently revoked, for violating the terms of his probation as well.

According to the channel’s financial reconstruction, the July 13 statement did not happen in a vacuum. Two days before it, on July 11, 2025, a $1,000 Venmo contribution came in that D’Amato identified on stream, in his own recorded voice, as going to “the ZDT legal fund.” Five days after it, on July 18, 2025, a $3,000 contribution came in that he identified on stream as going “towards legal.” The statement of the method sits in the middle of a week that, according to the same financial record, brought in $4,000 explicitly earmarked for legal costs.

EXHIBIT C: FUNDRAISING THAT STARTED BEFORE THE RESTRAINING ORDER DID

September 2, 2025. Ten days before D’Amato’s first petition against Brooks.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=au6xJlvOLcQ]

“And thanks, everybody, for donating to the Cash App and Venmos as well. If you guys could drop those links, that is for the Justice for ZDT Fund. All goes towards legal bills, because, you know, my mouth needs lawyers.”

September 3, 2025. One day later.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dtY-Gxo_KxI]

“And then when I sue you and when I get an R.O. against you, Cody, you’re going to pay my legal fees. OK, you’re going to pay the legal fees. And Jarred is going to have a restraining order.”

The second clip is addressed to Cody of this publication in addition to Brooks. But in the same breath, D’Amato names Brooks by his first name and predicts, correctly, that Brooks would end up with a restraining order against him. Nine days later, he filed the petition that produced it.

EXHIBIT D: TIMED TO THE DOCKET

March 30, 2026. Three days after this case was filed.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VjXASDkdTx0]

“So the ZDT Freedom and Justice Fund is open, and I need to raise some money for some legal assistance for a few different matters here that we’re going to have to handle.”

D’Amato’s own description of the fund matters here. He calls it money for “a few different matters,” not money set aside for any one case specifically.

May 20, 2026. The Wednesday before a Tuesday hearing in this case.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7RDPSXyUnEE]

“And the individual who I have this action against for this Tuesday court date… for those of you who have been giving to the Freedom Fund on Venmo and Cash App, I really appreciate it. It’s very helpful.”

The following Tuesday, May 26, 2026, was a continued hearing in this case, billed at five hours in the declaration D’Amato later filed in support of his fee motion.

June 22, 2026. The day of the hearing that produced the restraining order now being billed.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JDbmwg161YU]

“I don’t know whether I’m going to do the official or the initial filings myself, you know, maybe start a fundraiser on a give-send-go for some legal fees, because, you know, we’re not quite there yet. If we get the decision today…”

He got the decision that day. A five-year restraining order against Brooks.

EXHIBIT E: HIS OWN NUMBER, AGAINST THE ONE HE’S ASKING FOR

June 23, 2026. The day after the last hearing billed in the fee declaration.

[Original Video: youtube.com/watch?v=_pyG0by3ZZA]

“And you know what’s really going to be funny? Garnishing his wages for the legal fees, which will be over $10,000.”

“Well, I mean, we’re going to get awarded the legal fees. There’s no question about that… But yeah, he doesn’t realize that when we’re awarded the legal fees that we can go after his wages.”

“My guess is that the legal fees probably may be in the $12,000 area, because of the extra hours that she’s had to put in.”

The declaration signed, on August 12, 2026, claims $23,075. That is roughly double the top end of the number D’Amato gave his own audience the day after the same hearings the declaration bills for.

June 29, 2026.

[Original Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o3hWYhi6Gm0]

“The whole thing about the legal fees is that he kept doing these motions, making the lawyer have to go back, have to respond to them, have to do all the things that a lawyer does and charge hourly for.”

Six weeks before he signed a declaration blaming Brooks’s motions for driving up the cost, D’Amato had already described that exact theory to his audience.

EXHIBIT F: THE DECLARATION ITSELF

The document that puts a number on all of this became public on August 18, 2026, filed by Christopher Chaney’s office on D’Amato’s behalf. Attached to it is a four-page declaration from Dawn Dunbar, the attorney who represented D’Amato in the underlying case, laying out how she gets to $23,075 in fees.

Dunbar states she has practiced law for 26 years, that her practice is restraining orders and criminal defense exclusively, that she handles two to three restraining order hearings a week, and that her rate is $650 an hour. Here is every entry in her declaration that adds up to the total:

The math holds. Thirty-five and a half hours at $650 an hour is $23,075, and the itemized entries sum to exactly that figure. Two of the eleven billed blocks of time, totaling ten hours, are for opposing motions Brooks himself filed and lost. The declaration is direct about what it thinks that means: “Most of these hours were spent on the frivolous motions from the Respondent.” That is close enough to what D’Amato told his own audience on June 29, in Exhibit E above, that it reads like the same sentence twice, once from the client on a livestream and once from the attorney under oath.

The declaration also contains what appear to be three drafting errors, all visible on the face of the document. Paragraph 6 dates a block of work “March 18, 2026- March 26, 2027,” a year that does not exist anywhere else in the filing. Paragraph 7 leaves the dollar amount for an out-of-state service fee as the placeholder “XXX,” never filled in before the document was signed and filed.

And paragraph 19, followed by paragraph 20, appears to swap the two parties: it states that “the Respondent spent the following costs: Court Parking: $40,” and then requests that the court “order Petitioner to pay the Respondent the amount of $23,197.40.” Read literally, that is D’Amato’s own attorney asking the court to order D’Amato to pay Brooks, the opposite of what the rest of the declaration requests, and the opposite of what paragraph 17 states outright: “Petitioner is the prevailing party.”

None of that changes the arithmetic, which checks out. It does mean that a document asking a court to make a $23,197.40 award, on the strength of the declarant’s own precision, misstates which party owes which party money in the very paragraph making the request.

EXHIBIT G: WHO’S ACTUALLY FUNDING THE FUND

Everything above establishes that money moves into this fund and that D’Amato has told donors it moves back out again. It says nothing about who is putting it in. A review of the channel’s 93 distinct donor accounts on YouTube and Rumble answers that with more precision than the “audience” framing suggests.

Those five accounts combined account for $20,759.70, 84 percent of everything the channel raised on YouTube and Rumble, across 362 separate transactions in a lookback over the past year. The top three donor accounts alone are 70 percent of platform revenue. The top ten are 94 percent. Whatever this fund is, it is not broad-based grassroots support. It is a small number of repeat givers, and five names at the top of that list alone accounts for nearly all of it.

There is a further pattern worth stating carefully, because it is suggestive and not proven. @86GOPFOREVER and @IMMINENCEFRONT donate in the same stream, on the same day, at least eight separate times. 86GOP and DANNYGONE do the same, at least eight times.

Repeated same-day, same-stream giving across accounts that are supposedly different people is the kind of pattern that, in other contexts, gets described as one donor spreading contributions across multiple handles. It is not confirmation. Confirming it would take IP records, payment-processor data, or a subpoena, none of which HeroNotZero has. What we do know is that the types of comments these accounts make are always similar and we would not be surprised if they were all proven to be accounts run by the same person.

What can be said on the public record alone is the pattern itself, and that if these five accounts are fewer than five people, the concentration above is even tighter than the table shows.

One more thread connects the platform data to the off-platform donations in Exhibit B. The $1,000 Venmo contribution on July 11, 2025, credited on air to “the ZDT legal fund,” was thanked by name as coming from “Danny gone.” That is the same name, on-air, as the recurring platform donor DANNYGONE. Whether or not the other account-matching pattern above holds up, this one requires no inference: it is the same name, said out loud, on two different giving channels. 86GOP is frequently thanked for his support as well.

What this table cannot show. Every figure here depends on a donation being visible, either in a platform’s public chat log or in D’Amato reading it aloud on stream. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Combined tracked income on these platforms dropped sharply starting in May 2026, after running $2,000 to $6,400 a month for the eight months before that. That could mean giving actually slowed. It could also mean fewer donations are being read aloud or are otherwise visible in what gets captured here. This dataset cannot distinguish between the two, and neither should this article.

WHAT THE LAW ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT PAYING TWICE

California fee statutes do not compensate a party for legal costs in the abstract. They compensate for fees actually incurred meaning fees the party became personally obligated to pay. When D’Amato when after DOA for fees, he was denied, because he was not able to show that he paid anything for the services.

The state Supreme Court set that standard in PLCM Group v. Drexler (2000) 22 Cal.4th 1084, and again in Trope v. Katz (1995) 11 Cal.4th 274. A party cannot collect fees never actually owed, and a request that would hand someone the same money twice, once from donors and once from a court order, does not become reasonable just because the total is in a declaration.

The Dunbar declaration, examined in detail below, offers no retainer agreement, no invoice, and no billing statement showing D’Amato personally owes anyone $23,075. What it offers is a sworn total. What the record above shows is a fund D’Amato has described, in his own words and on many occasions over the years, as something donors pay into and opponents pay back.

A hearing on the fee request is scheduled for October 1. Nothing in this piece states what Judge Hancock-Goode will decide, because nothing here decides it. What the recordings, the financial data, and the declaration itself show is what D’Amato told his own audience, in his own voice, about how the money moves, and what his attorney told the court afterward.

SOURCING

Video timestamps and quotations were verified against the original broadcast recordings and, where noted, against machine-generated caption files independently transcribed. Financial figures are drawn from a reconstruction of the channel’s YouTube and Rumble superchat, gift-membership, and rant revenue, plus off-platform CashApp and Venmo mentions identified through a scan of the same broadcast transcripts. The donor concentration figures in Exhibit G are drawn from the same underlying platform data, reviewed separately for account-level totals and giving patterns. Dollar figures attributed to specific donors and dates are sourced to that reconstruction. The Request for Order and the Declaration of Dawn Dunbar quoted in Exhibit F are public filings in LASC Case No. 26STRO01932, filed August 18, 2026. D’Amato has not been asked for comment on the matters described in this piece due to ongoing legal threats and actions against this publication. However, he is always welcome to comment below.

Updated Oct. 22, 2026: The donor table and totals now include payments that were missing from the original export and were recovered from archived chat records: two gift-membership purchases by 86GOP and 14 payments by DANIELLE VILLEDA.

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