He Livestreamed His Own Evasion. Now ZeroDarkTony Tells an Appeals Court He Was Never Served.

Now she was trying again, this time from her computer. She pulled up the YouTube channel belonging to the man she was trying to serve. His name on the platform was ZeroDarkTony.

He was live.

Not just live. He was streaming to 7,850 subscribers, playing a video game called Apex Legends, and talking about the restraining order. About the process server trying to find him. About the address she had for him.

“They will never serve me,” he said on stream. “What have they got? An old address from three to five years ago. Some Woodland Hills address from 5 years ago.”

Linn began texting the mother of the petitioner. She told her to document the stream. Then she got in her car and drove back to Woodland Hills.

Nearly two years later, on June 22, 2026, a three-judge panel at California’s Second Appellate District heard Anthony D’Amato’s attorney argue that his client had never been properly served with that restraining order at all.

The panel had questions.

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The Case

The civil harassment restraining order at the center of this appeal was filed in June 2024 by [S.], then 17 years old, through his guardian ad litem, his mother. The respondent was Anthony D’Amato Jr., a content creator in his mid-50s who livestreamed under the name ZeroDarkTony, primarily on YouTube and Rumble.

The petition alleged civil harassment. A temporary restraining order was issued. Someone had to serve it on D’Amato.

That turned out to be harder than expected.

The restraining order that ultimately resulted from the case contributed to a separate criminal filing against D’Amato involving 26 charges. That criminal matter has since resolved. The civil case, case number 24STRO03892, produced a restraining order in August 2024 that D’Amato is now challenging on appeal, case number B345307 in the Second Appellate District.

His central argument: he was never properly served, so the hearing that produced the restraining order should never have happened without him.

The argument was heard Monday, June 22, 2026, before Justices Bendix, Rothschild, and Kim in Division 1. D’Amato’s attorney, Steven Tamer, appeared by videoconference from a remote location. Respondent’s attorney, David Weber, was in the courtroom.

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The Declaration

To understand what happened at oral argument Monday, you have to understand what Sarah Linn put in writing.

Linn is a Los Angeles County Registered Process Server, registration number 4470, owner of her own process serving firm in Northridge. Before that, she spent years as a federal criminal defense paralegal working on FBI wiretap cases. She has been serving legal documents since 1985.

On July 8, 2024, she received a request from [S.’s mother]. Linn ran an expanded search on Anthony D’Amato Jr. through idiCORE, a professional database available only to registered process servers and private investigators. The database returned one result. It listed an address on Crestlawn Street in Woodland Hills as his “Likely Current Address (12/01/2011-Current).”

She drove there on July 10 at 4:01 in the afternoon. Small silver-blue car in the driveway. Glass front door. No one visible inside. No sound, no activity. No response.

The next morning at 8:30, she found him on YouTube.

He was not just aware of the restraining order. He was tracking it in real time, discussing it with his audience, and explaining why they would never catch him. When chatters suggested he accept electronic service, he was loud about it: he does not accept e-service. No, they cannot serve him by publication. His lawyer would have it taken care of “in five seconds, over in five seconds.”

He also said, on camera, to thousands of viewers: “Someone’s going to put a fucking muzzle on this kid, and if you want to call that a threat…”

Linn texted [S.’s mother]. She told her to document the stream. Then she got back in her car and drove to Woodland Hills a second time, listening to the livestream through her phone while she drove.

She arrived at 5:47 PM. Same small car. She knocked for twelve minutes. She went around the side of the house. She called out. She was walking back to her car when a young man came out and asked if he could help. He had a phone in his hand. He was on speaker with someone. She asked for Anthony D’Amato. The man on the phone said D’Amato had not lived there in two and a half years.

That confirmed what D’Amato had already said on stream. The database address was old. She marked it a bad address.

On July 12 she tried a second location: Parthenia Street in Northridge, which appeared on D’Amato’s skip trace as associated with his mother. He was not there either. His mother appeared to have moved years ago.

She had also noted, while reviewing her research, that the second address in the database was a torn-down USPS station, a PO box location. The third was a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency in Hollywood. D’Amato had spent years routing his mail through boxes and CMRAs. His full address history in the database ran to 27 entries across Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oregon, and New York.

But Linn had something else. She had been watching his streams. And D’Amato had already made clear, in his own posts to his own audience, that he knew exactly what was happening.

This post was published before June 15, 2024. The restraining order petition had been filed June 4. D’Amato was aware of it within days. He knew the case number. He had seen the documents. And he was already announcing he would never appear in court.

He also knew the deadline for service.

He was counting down. He knew when the window closed. And he was threatening the family of the petitioner in writing, in public, while doing it.

On July 15, Linn filed her Declaration of Due Diligence and Need for Alternate Service Method with the court. She laid out the timeline, the database search, the three physical attempts, the livestream she watched, the words she heard, the texts she sent. She described D’Amato as someone who had “taken measures to conceal his physical location over the years through utilizing PO Boxes and CMRAs.”

She asked the court to authorize service via his YouTube channel and his Twitter/X account.

On July 19, 2024, Judge Melanie Ochoa signed the order.

The order made the statutory findings in writing. There was nothing vague about it.

That same day, Linn served D’Amato via his Twitter/X account, @ZeroDarkTony.

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After Service

What happened next is documented in a second declaration Linn filed on August 5.

As soon as service was complete, D’Amato began livestreaming threats. Against the judge. Against the process server. Against [S.]’s mother. Against [S.] himself. Linn documented hours of it.

In her declaration, filed under penalty of perjury, Linn described what she heard on those streams. She wrote that D’Amato stated on stream that [S.] “will be harmed in an attack” before the end of the summer. That his father “was not doing the job.” She wrote that D’Amato stated on stream that he “can’t wait until the MINOR PETITIONER turns 18” and that he “has dreams of raping the MINOR PETITIONER.” She wrote that he made sexual remarks about [S.]’s mother on stream as well.

“I have been serving documents over 39 years,” Linn wrote, “and the vulgarities, the horrific details of what RESPONDENT states LIVE he wants to do to the minor PETITIONER is cause for alarm. Why a 54-year-old RESPONDENT is obsessing and thinking thoughts of violence and twisted sex, streaming hours on end over a 17-year-old is cause for OFFICIALS to take notice and for concern.”

She also documented him admitting to swatting.

And then he posted something else, from the same @ZeroDarkTony account he was claiming he had never been served through.

He was negotiating. On the same account. Through which he had just been served. With documents he claimed he had never received.

On August 16, 2024, the hearing was held. D’Amato did not appear. The restraining order was granted.

On August 16, 2024, on stream, he said: “No courtroom will ever see me.”

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The Appeal

D’Amato filed a notice of appeal on March 26, 2025. The case was assigned attorney Steven Tamer. It did not move quickly. There were multiple defaults for missed deadlines, motions for relief, extensions on extensions. The appellate record was not complete until November 2025. Tamer filed D’Amato’s opening brief in January 2026. Weber filed the respondent’s brief in May 2026. Tamer filed no reply brief. 

While the reply brief is technically optional, it is unusual and generally considered a poor strategy for an attorney not to file one.

Because the respondent’s brief is an attack on the opening brief, the reply brief is the appellant’s absolute last chance to write to the court, defend their position, and get the “last word” before oral arguments. By choosing not to file a reply brief, or failing to file one, attorney Steven Tamer essentially left Weber’s counter-arguments completely unanswered on the written record.

The case was deemed fully briefed on May 27, 2026, with only two briefs on record where three are typical.

Oral argument was scheduled for June 22, 2026.

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The Oral Argument

The courtroom at the Second Appellate District sits inside a building on South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. On Monday, David Weber was there in person. Steven Tamer joined by video.

The panel was announced: Justices Bendix, Rothschild, and Kim. Presiding Justice Rothschild ran the session. Tamer asked for 20 minutes with 10 held for rebuttal. Rothschild told him to proceed.

Before Tamer had gotten far, Justice Bendix stopped him.

Tamer had opened by arguing that the Linn declaration was vague, that it lacked specific dates and details, that the process server had offered only generalized claims about evasion.

Bendix had the declaration in front of her.

“The declaration she filed, Sarah Linn, was on July 15, 2024,” she said. She began reading from the record. July 10, Woodland Hills, 4:01 PM, no response. July 11, 8:30 AM, found D’Amato livestreaming to 7,800 people, heard him say “they will never serve me.” July 11, 5:47 PM, second attempt, learned from resident he hadn’t lived there in two and a half years. July 12, Parthenia Street, mother’s address, also dead end.

“I don’t think the declaration is devoid of dates and detail the way that you’re describing it to the court,” she said.

Tamer shifted. He argued there was no confirmation that the @ZeroDarkTony accounts on Twitter and YouTube actually belonged to his client. The process server had simply found accounts on the internet and assumed they were his. There was no proof.

Bendix pointed out that after service was effected through those accounts, D’Amato used those same accounts to respond to the service. He posted on them. He made offers on them. He issued threats on them. He never denied the accounts were his.

“There’s clearly evidence from which the court can infer this was his email, his account,” she said.

Weber, in his argument, added the detail that in D’Amato’s own declaration, filed by his own attorney in the motion to set aside, D’Amato admitted to blocking the petitioner from his Twitter account. You cannot block someone from an account that is not yours. When Judge Ochoa asked D’Amato at the October 2024 hearing what name he had blocked, he said he did not know. It had not been the petitioner who served him.

Tamer’s argument shifted again. Now he was arguing that the process server’s physical attempts had been insufficient. That she had never served him at a place where he actually lived, so the attempts didn’t count. That going to wrong addresses was not due diligence.

Rothschild noted, directly, that in his opening argument Tamer had said he was not challenging whether there was due diligence in the original service. “Now he’s changed his argument,” Rothschild said.

Bendix asked whether Tamer had even raised this due diligence argument in his written appellate brief, noting that arguments not raised in the brief generally cannot be introduced for the first time at oral argument.

Justice Kim then made a sharp analytical point. She drew a distinction between “due diligence” and “exhaustion.” The statute, CCP § 527.6(m)(2), requires a diligent effort. It does not require that every possible method be exhausted. Tamer, she observed, seemed to be treating the two as identical. 

“Diligence meaning you’re just trying your best,” Kim pressed. “Exhaustion means you’ve got options and you’ve done each and every single thing. There are no more options left.”

Bendix confirmed it. “The statute 527.6(m)(2) uses the expression ‘it requires a diligent effort.’ It doesn’t say exhaustion of all reasonable methods.”

Weber, for his part, cited a 2025 first-impression decision called Yu v. Posniak, which defined what “diligent effort” means under the statute. He walked through why the Posniak case, where the court actually reversed the service order, was factually distinguishable from this one. In Posniak, the process server failed to explain why he believed the defendant would be at the address he chose, and provided no information about his qualifications. Linn explained both in detail.

Weber got few hostile questions. He made his points, told the panel he was happy to answer anything further, and sat down. 

Tamer used his rebuttal time to argue the screenshots were undated. That because the process server said the posts came “after” service, and did not give a specific date, there was no proof of when they were made.

Tamer asked, “When is after?”

Rothschild responded with brevity. “After is not before or at the same time.”

By 4:46 PM the argument was over. Presiding Justice Rothschild thanked counsel and said the matter was submitted

Bendix, mic still on, offered a final observation to her colleagues. “I feel like I’m in Civil Procedure One again.”

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What Comes Next

The panel will deliberate and issue a written opinion. California appellate courts typically publish within 90 days of submission.

D’Amato is asking the court to vacate the restraining order entirely and remand for a new hearing at which he would actually participate. The restraining order remains in effect while the appeal is pending.

To win, D’Amato needs the panel to find that the trial court was wrong on the law: that the alternative service order was legally deficient, that the process server’s declaration was insufficient, that the statute was misapplied. The panel must make those findings against the written findings signed by Judge Ochoa, against the timeline documented by Linn, and against a record in which D’Amato’s own posts, streams, and statements are attached as court exhibits.

What the panel will ultimately decide is unknown. What is known is what they said on the record Monday. Bendix told Tamer his premise was wrong. Rothschild told him he had changed his argument mid-session. Kim told him diligence and exhaustion are not the same thing. Bendix closed by noting she felt like she was back in Civil Procedure One.

The matter is submitted.

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Case documents cited in this article are public records from the Los Angeles Superior Court (24STRO03892) and the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District (B345307). The oral argument video is publicly available on the Second Appellate District’s website. Declaration exhibits cited are attached to court filings and are part of the appellate record.

HeroNotZero covers accountability journalism at the intersection of online harassment, platform dynamics, and legal proceedings. Find us at heronotzero.org.