In April 2020, Lesh posted photos on Instagram showing a snowmobiler jumping a drift at Keystone — at a time when COVID was raging and the federal land was closed. The images were accompanied by the caption “solid park sesh, no lift ticket needed” and tagged with “#FuckVailResorts.”
Lesh was already well known in social media circles full of people who think it's hilarious to blithely abuse the world and then laugh about it — so, you know, mainly thirteen-year-olds — for his purposefully offensive posts, such as the supposedly faked photo of Lesh defecating in Hanging Lake at Maroon Bells, again during a time when the area was off limits to the public.
David Lesh, showing what he thinks of the great outdoors (and apparently his customer base).
Instagram
But it was that snowmobile stunt in April 2020 that inspired actual charges, though the court of public opinion had already condemned Lesh's propensity to use obnoxious dude-bro influencer actions to push Virtika, the similarly branded company he'd founded. The website for Virtika still shows a video of Lesh — naked and riding a camel — surrounded by a heavily armed stripper and two bikini-clad women with dwarfism, with the claim that they're "a bunch of misfit, rag-tag, miscreants."
In the relatively halcyon days of 2022, the clear violations that Lesh so eagerly posted to Instagram earned him a sentence of six months probation, 160 hours of community service, and a $10,000 fine.
But on July 16, even that wrist-slap was eliminated, with the court tossing Lesh’s conviction for engaging in unauthorized work activity on public land; he'd insisted the Instagram post was personal, not a Virtika promotion. Lesh's conviction for riding a snowmobile on closed public lands is still in play, however.
Beyond cushioning Lesh's well-deserved fall from the lofty heights of public-pooping self-promotion, the ruling sets up a larger issue: The original verdict was delivered without a jury trial because of what's called the "petty offense exception" to that constitutionally afforded right. In the Appeals decision, Judge Tim Tymkovich held that this exception may be inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to a jury trial in criminal cases, and urged the Supreme Court to revisit the matter.
The appeal was pushed hard by the conservative legal organization New Civil Liberties Alliance, whose name so closely resembling that of the American Civil Liberties Union is perhaps not accidental. The NCLA made headlines earlier this year for being one of the groups responsible for the cases that reversed the Chevron decision, which Supreme Court dissenter Justice Elena Kagan called tantamount to giving "itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law."
David Lesh and some models. Not pictured: a camel, which had second thoughts about participating in this promotional video.
Hard-hitting stuff, right up there with the bodily autonomy of women, the epidemic of gun violence, the civil rights of all Americans, and the protection of American democracy. Sure, we may all soon be living under despotic rule, but we can rest assured that our right to record what's left of the nation and the freedoms we once knew on social media platforms unfettered from any legal objections.
Meanwhile, here's something that the courts, such as they are here in 2024, can't overturn: David Lesh was and is a boring man-child who thinks it's hilarious to pretend to poop in pristine public lakes. The fact that he now has the imprimatur of the broken U.S. judiciary to continue to do so shouldn't worry Americans at all. Not one bit.
Concludes Lesh: "This is not just a victory for me, but for basic American freedom and social liberty."
