But no one is admitting to producing the tabloid-style takedown site.
In August, Winter Garden gym owner Alexander Arthur filed a defamation lawsuit against three digital content creators and their companies, alleging “on information and belief” — but without any concrete evidence —that the trio colluded to create the snide tabloid-style website, RealAustinArthur.com.
The site publishes hyped-up negative news about Austin Arthur, who is running to unseat District 1 County Commissioner Nicole Wilson. Posts vary in tone and style, suggesting a few writers. Posts carry this disclaimer: "RealAustinArthur.com is an independent website anonymously run by a group of private citizen voters who live in Orange County District 1. Austin Arthur is seriously BUTTHURT (sic) that this website is exposing all of his scandals and he is falsely blaming Nicole Wilson.”
The lawsuit, filed in the Ninth Circuit Court and seeking more than $50,000 in damages, claims that Winter Garden residents and political activists Jacob Malherbe and Roseanna Malherbe, directed Stephen J. Dibert, of Palm Beach County, to create the website, which in turn published defamatory statements about Alexander Arthur, his business Gymnastics USA and his brother Austin.
“The only person that would hire [Dibert] would be Nicole Wilson or the Malherbes,” Alexander Arthur told VoxPopuli in a phone interview. He quickly discounted Wilson’s involvement. “I just don’t think it’s Nicole Wilson. I think it’s Roseanna Malherbe who’s doing Nicole Wilson’s dirty work. The Malherbes are the ones that have been relentlessly attacking Austin in the first place.”
Alexander Arthur pointed to Roseanna Malherbe’s Facebook page. He said the page and the website both focused on Austin Arthur’s relationship with Orange County developer Scott Boyd and rural development.
“She was relentless on this and on these crazy conspiracy theories about Scott Boyd and Austin Arthur having like backroom deals to create monster developments and stuff like that,” Alexander Arthur said. “Like Austin's making all this money with Scott Boyd, all those crazy stories. And she was posting about that, and so was the website … So they're obviously in cahoots.”
But Alexander Arthur admitted, he doesn’t have the receipts.
“Do I have the credit card statement or the check that she wrote to Stephen Dibert to hire him to make this website? No, I don’t,” he said.
As we reported this story, on Oct. 18, RealAustinArthur.com was the first to report about a clash between an Austin Arthur campaign volunteer named Gregg A. Jones and a Wilson supporter who VoxPopuli later identified as Roseanna Malherbe. Caught on dashcam, the two argued about Jones putting campaign signs near her house.
"I do not want his signs on my property. This is my property. And when I asked you to move it, you threatened me," a woman believed to be Roseanna Malherbe can be heard saying off camera. She said she called Orange County Sheriff's Office. VoxPopuli has requested the incident report.
Apparently, this was Jones' second attempt to place signs near her home. The day before, a sign had allegedly been planted on the swale, with an added nail-strip beneath the sign to make it harder, and potentially dangerous to remove.
What's telling is that there's only one plausible source for the story details and the video, which had only appeared on the Malherbes' social media pages as a share from RealAustinArthur.com. This suggests that Roseanna Malherbe wrote the post about her run-in with Jones on RealAustinArthur.com or told her story to another writer who did.
VoxPopuli reached out to both Malherbes for comment but have not yet heard back. We'll update the story when we do.
Ardent Wilson supporters
The Malherbes have made no secret that they are ardent Nicole Wilson supporters. In 2020, records show, Roseanna Malherbe donated $179.15 to Wilson’s first campaign for county commission. This year, she donated $1,000 — the most allowable by law — to Wilson’s re-election campaign.
While not affiliated with the Wilson campaign, the couple has been working in the capacity of concerned citizens to get her re-elected. And they’ve been outspoken that Austin Arthur is ill-suited to replace her on the county commission. So much so that they created two Facebook pages —Neighborhood Watch District 1 Orange County FL and Orange County Rural Settlement for Nicole Wilson. According to court documents obtained by VoxPopuli, they spent $17,783.60 on sponsored ads to post memes, videos, interviews and articles to highlight the differences between Wilson and Austin Arthur and urge their page followers to remember to vote and to vote for Wilson.
The Malherbes are attempting to get the lawsuit dismissed, asserting the litigation is “nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to silence their political advocacy,” according to the court documents. They say Alexander Arthur has nothing more than “a vague assertion … without any factual support” to connect them with the RealAustinArthur.com website.
They’ve had some recent success with getting lawsuits dismissed that try to tie them to the RealAustinArthur.com site.
Last month, they got a defamation lawsuit, filed by Orange County developer Scott Boyd, kicked. That lawsuit alleged that they created the RealAustinArthur.com site and “published blog posts to the Website (sic) that contained defamatory and untrue statements” about Boyd’s relationship with Austin Arthur.
At issue were four blog posts bylined by Gustavo Fring — a pseudonym from a character on the AMC hit Breaking Bad. But since the Malherbes’ names weren’t on the articles and there was no evidence showing they published the website, the defamation claim was dismissed.
Jacob Malherbe acknowledged in court documents a tangential connection to the website. In mid-July, he paid for one sponsored ad on the Neighborhood Watch District 1 page that linked to the RealAustinArthur.com home page. He maintains that on July 24, after receiving a cease and desist letter from the Arthurs’ attorney he deleted the link. In addition, Roseanna Malherbe drove her car around, sporting a magnet emblazoned with the candidate’s mugshot and the RealAustinArthur.com URL as a statement of her “opposition to Austin Arthur’s candidacy.”
“At the time it was the only place that had his mugshot and was talking bout how bad Austin Arthur was,” Jacob Malherbe explained in a text message.
Even so, both Malherbes maintain that that's the extent of their involvement. They’ve stated in multiple court documents that they don’t write for, publish or own RealAustinArthur.com. They say they don’t know who does. As for Stephen J. Dibert, Jacob Malherbe described him in a statement to VoxPopuli as “a person I have never heard of, spoken to or had anything to do with.”
Both have made declarations to that effect, submitted to the court, “under penalties of perjury.”
Similar sites
Likewise, Dibert denies all knowledge of the RealAustinArthur.com website, its genesis and the Malherbes.
“I have no idea who Roseanna and Jacob Malherbe are. I have never spoken to the Malherbes nor have I ever met them. Therefore, I have never gotten paid by them,” Dibert told VoxPopuli via email.
Dibert — who is also fighting another Florida defamation lawsuit in U.S. District Court, brought by a Canadian mortgage company in 2023 for allegedly publishing articles like “Lawsuit Alleges Wannabe Miami Developer Caroline Weiss Perpetrated a Multi-Million Dollar Fraud Scheme Against Her Own Children” — is attempting to get this defamation lawsuit against himself dismissed.
In his motion, filed Oct. 15, he suggested that Alexander Arthur is suing “solely because he suspects Defendant Dibert created a website that is critical of him and his brother Austin Arthur who is currently running for public office.”
"Honestly,” Dibert told VoxPopuli in his email, “I could care less what goes on politically in Florida.”
That may be the sentiment now, but Dibert spent two years dishing the dirt on politicians in Delray Beach, Florida, for a tabloid-style website called DelrayBeachConfidential, starting in January 2022. Posts were written under the pseudonyms Delray Snoop, Delray Snoop Editor and Delray Beach Confidential Staff, and they were shared on Facebook and cross-posted to Medium, where “Steve Dibert” and his company “MFI-Miami” appeared in at least one article description on Google.
Dibert told VoxPopuli that he didn’t own DelrayBeachConfidential, but that “a number of people were involved in the creation and content of the site, including me and a number of people involved in Palm Beach County politics and Florida politics in 2021.” He said he stopped contributing in 2022.
VoxPopuli examined every post on DelrayBeachConfidential and found that Delray Snoop consistently linked to a writer named “Steve” while Delray Snoop Editor linked to a writer named Chris Mitchell. Those were the only two names associated with the site. The Delray Beach Confidential Staff byline appeared sporadically beginning in July 2022. The last time Delray Snoop/Steve posted was Feb. 21, 2024, and it's the most recent post on the site.
This connection between Dibert and DelrayBeachConfidential is important because the RealAustinArthur.com site is almost identical in structure, design, color choice, typography and tone. Hover the cursor over Gustavo Fring’s bylines and those posts link back to DelrayBeachConfidential Staff.
When VoxPopuli asked Dibert, if he wasn’t the creative force behind RealAustinArthur.com, what explanation could there be for the site’s similarities and the link to Delray Beach Confidential Staff byline, he said, “I have no clue.”
Out of Florida?
As part of his motion to quash the lawsuit, Dibert submitted a document to the Ninth Circuit Court that purports to show the website is owned and created by an entity in London. However, an independent IT expert VoxPopuli consulted said that scenario is unlikely.
“There are companies that offer hosting services in any country you like, all managed from here,” explained Shaun Fulton, who has been in the information technology field for nearly 40 years. “Everything is virtual. You can make anything appear to be something it isn’t.”
An interesting side note to all of this is that Dibert claims he no longer lives in Florida and therefore is not subject to the Ninth Circuit Court’s jurisdiction. He used that same argument in his other defamation case, which the U.S. District Court flatly rejected.
On Oct. 15, Dibert provided the Ninth Circuit Court an affidavit, notarized in Spanish, stating that he has lived in Colombia since Aug. 27, 2024, and is applying for permanent residency. However, on Oct. 10, in his other defamation case, Dibert filed a counterclaim for defamation against the Canadian mortgage company that is suing him. In that document, he described his living situation as “currently traveling with residence yet to be determined.”
That's not quite the same as "applying for permanent residency."
Ultimately the U.S. District Court decided that Dibert ran a business and lived in Florida “at the time of the allegedly defamatory publications,” and therefore he was under the court’s jurisdiction.
Here in Orange County's Ninth Circuit, where RealAustinArthur.com began publishing posts in July, Judge Brian Sandor currently has the case. It remains to be seen what he has to say.
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