More serious misconduct from the anti-vaccine movement’s inner circle
James Moody, prominent anti-vax lawyer, disbarred for pocketing client’s money
By Brian Deer
20 April 2025
James A. Moody (aka Jim Moody), a founding board member of the US National Autism Association (NAA), has been barred from legal practice for “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” after being found to have pocketed more than half a million dollars in client funds.
According to court documents, Moody told a client – Lion Farms LLC, a California raisin producer – that a settlement payment of more than $7.6 million due to it after an agricultural dispute with the federal government would be paid directly to the company.
In fact, Moody, who practiced in Washington DC, had already received the money himself and taken the first installments of an eventual $585,000 for his personal use, typically in $10,000 increments.
“Before Lion Farms even knew that [Moody] had received the settlement funds, [Moody] had already withdrawn $200,000,” says a report on the case, issued in February 2024 by the professional responsibility board of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Moody is one of the most well-known attorneys in the anti-vaccine movement, and the revelation of his career-destroying conduct will surely provoke ear-fingering disbelief or an eerie lack of surprise.
Additional to his NAA board membership, Moody is a business partner of the British-born research cheat Andrew Wakefield, who was banned from medicine for fraud and dishonesty, and is the law section editor of an anti-vaccine website, “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law,” endorsed as a bona fide research source by Robert F. Kennedy Jr during Senate hearings in February.
READ HOW DEER’S WAKEFIELD
INVESTIGATION WAS CHECKED
Among countless other involvements, Moody (former bar registration #294504) was also counsel to Jenny McCarthy’s SafeMinds organization, legal advisor to a syndicate representing thousands of plaintiffs in failed 2007 US Vaccine Court hearings, and has authored numerous lengthy but unsuccessful complaints on behalf of anti-vaccine groups in both the United States and Britain.
In the Lion Farms affair, correspondence shows that four years after performing what the company later called “relatively little work” on the federal settlement, Moody retrospectively decided, without any prior agreement (a breach of professional rules in itself), that he was entitled to one third of his client’s compensation.
Evidently fearing his client might view things differently, he transferred the money to a private account and spent it on personal debts and living expenses.
“The company learned from other sources, seven months after the fact, that the government had paid [Moody],” says the report that led to his disbarment. “After ignoring two inquiries from Lion Farms, [Moody] simply mailed a check to Lion Farms for approximately two thirds of the amount of the settlement funds ($5,039,821.47). Lion Farms repeatedly asked about the remaining settlement funds, but [Moody] still failed to respond.”
After a bar disciplinary committee hearing , which Moody failed to attend, the panel found by “clear and convincing evidence” that he was culpable for “intentional misappropriation” in spending his client’s money on himself while failing to respond to its repeated requests concerning its whereabouts.
Deploring Moody’s “outright mendacity and artful misrepresentations,” the committee ruled that his “intentional failure to inform Lion Farms that he was
holding the settlement funds and had begun withdrawing his purported fee, while ignoring repeated inquiries, was dishonest, fraudulent, and deceitful.”
It was also found that Moody failed to co-operate with a D.C. Bar arbitration board; ignored superior court proceedings brought against him by his client; disregarded a default court order to pay; refused to answer the door of his apartment when called on by a process server; and even more remarkably, “continued to help himself to Lion Farms’s settlement funds.”
In addition to the dishonesty findings, charges were upheld against Moody of “serious interference with administration of justice” and breaches of his duty to comply with court and board orders.
“He has clearly demonstrated a total disregard for the legal system he is sworn to uphold,” the committee noted.
In the matter of:
JAMES A. MOODY
Board docket No. 23-BD-022
Disc docket No. 2022-D222
