Covid misformation-spreading lawyer has dark history of sexual harassment accusations: report

Thomas Renz became a licensed attorney just before the start of the pandemic. Now, he's making a name for himself as a spreader of misinformation about COVID-19, one of his claims being that people are dying from the COVID-19 vaccine.

As The Washington Post points out, Renz has been at the head of federal lawsuits in six states challenging shutdowns, mask mandates and vaccines while claiming that the threat from the virus is exaggerated.

"It is a highly visible role for Renz, 44, who passed the Ohio bar exam in November 2019 on his fifth attempt and has limited litigation experience, according to a Washington Post examination of his career," writes the Post's Shawn Boburg and Jon Swaine. "Before becoming a lawyer, he worked an array of jobs, including at a nonprofit that told The Post it terminated him and at a rural credit union. Two female employees at the credit union accused him of repeatedly making sexually suggestive comments at work and one alleged he touched her breast in 2014, according to letters the women wrote to the credit union's chief executive that were obtained by The Post."

Boburg and Swaine contend that Renz's lawsuits reflect the strategy employed by allies of former President Trump who were trying to undermine the results of the 2020 election, who raised money and made headlines by filing lawsuits, or promising to file them, based on dubious claims.

In an email to the post, Renz said that his law firm had been paid "around $250,000" so far for his COVID lawsuits. "I am certainly not making much off of this," he claimed.

"If you know there are safe and effective treatments and actively work to cover them up to promote sales of an untested injection that is only able to be categorized as a vaccine after the definition of the word 'vaccine' is changed, then it is my personal belief that what is happening is akin to murder," he wrote.

Read the full report over at The Washington Post.