User:Louis/Dragonfly Energy trade libel suit Will Prowse

This is research, not legal advice, and not a substitute for a licensed Nevada attorney. Louis Rossmann is not a lawyer and is not Will Prowse's counsel. The single most important step below is retaining Nevada anti-SLAPP counsel before the 60-day special-motion clock runs.

On June 1, 2026, Dragonfly Energy Corp., the maker of Battle Born Batteries, sued DIY-solar reviewer William "Will" Prowse and his company Prowse Publications LLC in Nevada state court, on four claims arising from a series of YouTube videos about the batteries. Dragonfly asks the court not only for damages but for an order barring Prowse's future statements about the batteries and requiring him to take down the videos already published. The strongest answer is procedural and fast: Nevada has one of the country's most defendant-friendly anti-SLAPP statutes, a product-safety review of a mass-market consumer battery sits close to the center of what that statute protects, and the Nevada Supreme Court has confirmed that the statute reaches every claim built on the protected speech, not only the libel count. A special motion to dismiss freezes discovery, forces Dragonfly to put up real proof early, and, if it succeeds, makes Dragonfly pay Prowse's legal fees plus up to $10,000.

What Dragonfly actually filed

The filed complaint: Dragonfly Energy Corp. v. Prowse, No. CV26-01604, Second Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada (Washoe County), filed June 1, 2026.

The case is in the Second Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada, in Washoe County (Reno), where Dragonfly is headquartered, as case number CV26-01604. Dragonfly is represented by Parsons Behle & Latimer, the same firm defending the company in a separate consumer class action over the same batteries (see below). The complaint pleads four claims:

• Trade libel / business disparagement, the central claim.
• Unfair competition / deceptive trade practices under the Nevada Deceptive Trade Practices Act, NRS 598.0915.
• Intentional interference with prospective economic advantage.
• Injunctive relief, pleaded as a separate count, seeking both a ban on future statements and removal of the existing videos, posts, thumbnails, and comments.

The factual core is a set of eleven YouTube videos Prowse published between December 2025 and May 2026, which Dragonfly says collectively drew more than 1.78 million views, in which he tore down and cycle-tested Battle Born batteries and concluded their terminal design is unsafe. Dragonfly's framing of the dispute is worth quoting, because the defense is built around it. Its chief commercial officer, Wade Seaburg, said in the company's press release:

"Dragonfly Energy respects and encourages good-faith product reviews, independent testing, and open technical discussion. This lawsuit is not about silencing criticism. It is about accountability when what we believe are false and misleading safety claims are presented as technical fact and amplified through monetized content."

A plaintiff that concedes on the record that it "respects and encourages good-faith product reviews, independent testing, and open technical discussion" has admitted the public-interest character of exactly the activity it is suing over.

The most important admission, though, is in the complaint's own description of how the batteries work. Dragonfly pleads that the Battle Born 100Ah 12-volt battery contains a "thermal protection fail-safe": a brass terminal post, an aluminum bolt, and a layer of PA-765 ABS polymer between the brass terminal and the copper bus bar. When the positive terminal overheats, the complaint pleads, "the polymer around the post will soften. That softening allows the terminal connection to loosen and the battery to become inoperable, thus interrupting the electrical path," so that "the loose positive terminal is not the cause of overheating; it is the consequence." In other words, Dragonfly's own pleading concedes that, by design, the terminal melts the polymer and the post comes loose under thermal stress. That concession is the spine of the truth defense: the physical behavior Prowse filmed is the behavior Dragonfly says the battery is built to perform.

The documented safety record behind the dispute

For both the trade-libel and the deceptive-practices claims, Dragonfly carries the burden of proving that Prowse's safety statements are materially false, because the speech is on a matter of public concern and Prowse is the publisher of his own reporting. The public record makes that burden hard to carry, because the central factual claim, that these terminals can overheat and fail, is corroborated from several independent directions and is partly conceded by Dragonfly itself.

Dragonfly's own diagram and paragraph 18 from the filed complaint: under a thermal event the polymer softens and the positive terminal post loosens, interrupting current. The complaint pleads the batteries "fail safely when the positive terminal post overheats."

Dragonfly concedes the mechanism. As above, the complaint pleads that the terminal is designed so the polymer melts and the post loosens after a thermal event. The certifications Dragonfly cites point the same way: the complaint states that the 100Ah battery "repeatedly and consistently passed the standard's most severe short-circuit test ... due to the presence of a thermal protection fail-safe." The melt-and-disconnect behavior is, on Dragonfly's own account, how the battery passes its safety test. Whether that behavior should be called a fail-safe or a flaw is a question of engineering judgment, not a question of whether the melting happens. Dragonfly made the same concession in the technical note it published to defend the design: it describes a brass contact and a copper contact "held face-to-face by a horizontal aluminum bolt" separated by a layer of PA-765 plastic that "begins to soften at 85°C," and it calls the resulting shutdown "permanent and irreversible by design."

A frame from Will Prowse's teardown of a Battle Born battery ("Battleborn Battery MELTED?! New Problem!", January 8, 2026): the internal bus bar and its bolted terminal connections, with heat discoloration on the metal.

Prowse is not the only source of the failure reports. The RV creator Grand Adventure (Mark Guido) documented four of his six Battle Born batteries failing, with heat discoloration around the terminals, and scrapped them at a hazardous-waste facility rather than complete Battle Born's warranty process, which he said required him to assume unacceptable risks and pay upfront inspection fees. The RV-electrical engineer Mike Sokol, after readers flooded him with reports of terminal overheating, put the question to Dragonfly's CEO, Denis Phares, who defended the melting terminal as a built-in fail-safe and said that about 0.2% of the installed base had shown elevated terminal resistance, which he attributed to "external factors such as improper installation, poor connections or system conditions." Prowse's own tests, meanwhile, were reported by the technology press as they were published. Hackaday covered his controlled tests in which a brand-new unit's negative-terminal enclosure melted under an 80-amp discharge, a unit cycled at 49 amps, well under its 100-amp rating, went into repeated battery-management-system disconnects while the spacer melted and the management system "never puts the battery into any kind of safe mode," and a 300-amp industrial unit "failed violently with a cell venting and the loose BMS rattling around in the case." An RV-industry outlet reported on Prowse's teardown of a field unit a follower had sent him, in which Prowse found the terminal lug had worked loose, measured the connection at more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and saw arcing inside the battery.

Consumers have sued over the same defect. On February 13, 2026, a putative consumer class action, Berdner v. Dragonfly Energy Holdings Corp., was filed in Sonoma County, California, and later removed to federal court. In Dragonfly's own words, in its annual report, the plaintiffs "allege that the products share a uniform design defect related to the positive terminal connection that can result in overheating, premature failure, and safety risk." The complaint itself is blunter. It alleges "a uniform dangerous design defect" that "poses a serious fire hazard and safety risk" and describes a positive terminal that "becomes loose with ordinary use, causing the positive battery terminal and battery cells to overheat to temperatures of 250 degrees Fahrenheit while recharging," because a plastic spacer keeps the terminal post from directly contacting the bus bar, so that "the bolt itself conducts current ... and causes 'arcing.'" The eight-count complaint, brought under California's consumer-protection, warranty, and false-advertising laws, asks the court to order a corrective-advertising campaign, to bar further sales until the batteries "meet industry standards" or carry full disclosure of that failure on the packaging, and to require relief "such as recalling the existing Products." It credits the defect's discovery to "the independent expert investigation published to YouTube in December 2025," citing the same teardown videos at the center of Dragonfly's suit against Prowse. That is a separate set of plaintiffs, represented by separate counsel, describing the same positive-terminal failure on the same battery line that Prowse documented.

Dragonfly's own Form 10-K (fiscal year 2025, Item 3, Legal Proceedings) disclosing the Berdner class action, which alleges a "uniform design defect related to the positive terminal connection that can result in overheating, premature failure, and safety risk."

Dragonfly's own SEC filings disclose the risk. In its annual report, Dragonfly warns investors that "[l]ithium-ion battery cells have been observed to catch fire or release smoke and flame," and that a product defect "could subject us to lawsuits, product recalls, or redesign efforts." The company's estimated warranty obligation rose from $307,000 at the end of 2023 to $514,000 at the end of 2024 to $867,000 at the end of 2025, nearly tripling over a span in which its net sales fell from $64.4 million to $58.6 million, so the growing reserve is not explained by selling more product. The build is a forward-looking estimate rather than a tally of claims already paid: in both 2024 and 2025 the warranty expense Dragonfly accrued for expected future claims ($541,000, then $538,000) ran ahead of what it actually paid out to settle claims that year ($334,000, then $185,000), on assurance-type warranties that run five to ten years.

What the UL listing establishes, and what it does not. Dragonfly's strongest answer to the safety criticism is that its batteries have an "ETL listing by Intertek ... to UL 2054 and IEC 62133 standards." The listing is real, and it is worth knowing what it is. UL 2054 is the "Household and Commercial Batteries" standard, a general pack-level standard for "portable ... batteries for use as power sources in products." The standard written for the stationary and vehicle-auxiliary energy-storage use these batteries are sold for is a different one, UL 1973, "Batteries for Use in Stationary and Motive Auxiliary Power Applications," which states that it "does not evaluate the performance ... or reliability" of the battery. For a permanently installed home energy-storage system, the system-level standard is UL 9540, which covers the complete energy-storage system and its installation rather than the battery pack alone. Marine practice is more permissive: the American Boat and Yacht Council standard ABYC E-13 lists UL 2054 among the battery testing standards it accepts. So the certification Dragonfly cites is a general battery standard rather than the stationary-storage standard, and, like any of these listings, it certifies a contained failure under defined laboratory tests, not immunity from failure in the field.

The consumer cost. Dragonfly sells the 100Ah 12-volt model for $799, marked down from $949. The packs are assembled in Reno, Nevada, but Dragonfly's SEC filings state that the lithium cells and the battery-management system are sourced from suppliers in China. And the warranty process itself is friction: Grand Adventure scrapped four batteries at a hazardous-waste facility rather than complete a claims process he said required him to assume unacceptable risks and pay upfront inspection fees.

No federal regulator has issued a recall or safety action on these batteries, and the defense does not claim one. The point is narrower and it is enough: the core message that these packs can overheat and fail at the terminal is substantially true, corroborated by other owners' documented failures, by a separate consumer class action, and by Dragonfly's own disclosures, and conceded in part by the complaint itself. Substantial truth is a complete defense, and the closest precedent is a manufacturer that sued a product-review organization over a critical test and lost, because sharp criticism of a product is "commonplace in the forum of robust debate." When the contested statement is a reviewer's evaluation of a product he tested, the Ninth Circuit has held a plaintiff simply cannot carry the falsity burden: "[a] reasonable jury could not find that Unelko met its burden of proving falsity by a preponderance of the evidence."

Battle Born's technical note

Battle Born's "Technical Note on the Safety and Design of the Battle Born 100Ah Positive Terminal," published March 31, 2026, as captured by the Wayback Machine on June 7, 2026.

On March 31, 2026, Battle Born published a "Technical Note on the Safety and Design of the Battle Born 100Ah Positive Terminal," an 11-page document issued under the names of both Battle Born Batteries and Dragonfly Energy, presenting the melting positive terminal as "a passive, irreversible shutdown mechanism that activates under sustained thermal fault conditions." The PDF's document metadata names David Haulot as the author, a name that appears nowhere in the body text, and gives a creation date of March 30, 2026, one day before the cover date and the same day Dragonfly filed the fiscal-year 2025 Form 10-K disclosing the Berdner class action.

The note arrived sixteen weeks into the dispute. Prowse's first video on the 100Ah terminal, documenting a 250 degree Fahrenheit reading on a sealed customer battery, was published December 10, 2025. The next day he read on camera a Battle Born customer-service email from representative Matthew Adams defending the terminal; RV Travel quoted the email on December 18, 2025 as describing the "aluminum nut design as being a purpose-built thermal failsafe." The Berdner class action over the same terminal was filed February 13, 2026. The note states its own purpose plainly: "We also address why the series of YouTube videos characterizing the design as unsafe is misleading." Nowhere in its 11 pages does it mention the Berdner litigation.

What the dispute is about, in plain terms

A battery terminal is the metal post the cables bolt onto. In a 100 amp-hour battery like this one, up to 100 amps of current passes through that post, and the connection only stays cool if the metal parts inside are pressed firmly together. In the Battle Born 100Ah design, the part doing the pressing is a layer of plastic that softens at 85°C, which is 185°F.

Imagine a wall plug held tight in its outlet by a wax washer that melts if the plug overheats. The maker's theory is that when the wax melts, the plug drops out and the power stops for good, before anything catches fire. The critics' footage shows the plug staying in, scorching, sparking, and re-seating itself when bumped. That is the whole dispute: both sides agree the plastic softens and the connection lets go under heat. Battle Born says that letting-go is a clean, permanent shutoff. Prowse filmed what the letting-go looked like on failed batteries.

What he filmed: a sealed customer battery whose positive terminal read 250°F during an ordinary charge and which randomly cut all power, with a forum-reported workaround of pushing the terminal sideways to bring it back; and, the next day, the same battery passing 60 to 95 amps of charging current through a terminal at 202°F and climbing, with visible arcing inside. A fastener that loosens at the design's own trigger temperature, keeps conducting, sparks, and reconnects when pushed is the behavior at issue. Whether that behavior is a safety feature or a defect is the question the rest of this section examines claim by claim.

Claim-by-claim analysis

UL 2054 certification and test history

Battle Born's lead certification claim in the note:

"The terminal design within the pack has been certified to UL 2054 Standards by Intertek (ETL Listed), passing the standard’s most severe short-circuit test, known as a Single Fault Short Circuit Test, repeatedly and consistently."

The ETL listing is real. Intertek's Directory of Listed Products shows Battle Born model numbers DF10012 and BB10012, listed as a "Lithium-Ion Battery Pack," which "have been tested, investigated and found to comply with the requirements of the Standard(s) for Safety Household and Commercial Batteries (UL-2054)". The directory entry names the battery pack; the note's sentence says the "terminal design within the pack" has been certified. What UL 2054 itself covers, a standard for portable household and commercial batteries rather than stationary or vehicle-auxiliary storage, is discussed in the certification discussion above.

The note's description of the test conditions checks out against published excerpts of the standard. UL 2054's pack-level clause 9.9 states that "Tests are to be conducted at 20 ±5°C (68 ±9°F) and at 55 ±5°C (131 ±9°F)", and clause 9.10 subjects battery pack constructions to "a single fault across any protective device in the load circuit of the battery under test." The note's "Any fire constitutes a failure" understates the pass criteria: the standard's own clause 9.6 states that "The samples shall not explode or catch fire. The temperature of the exterior cell or battery casing shall not exceed 150°C (302°F)", and the pack-level clause 9.12 adds that "the tests shall not result in chemical leaks caused by cracking, rupturing or bursting of the internal cell jacket."

Battle Born's dating of the test pass rests on company records: the note claims "Battle Born passed this test at the end of 2017 with all ten samples, at both temperatures, without fire", and the Intertek directory entry does not state a listing date. By the note's own dates, the product "first reached market in 2016" (page 7) and first passed the UL 2054 short-circuit test "at the end of 2017" (page 2), so the battery sold for roughly a year before the pass the note describes.

The listing exists; it names a battery pack under a portable-battery standard, the test has more failure criteria than fire alone, and the 2017 pass date is the company's own.

Terminal materials and the creep study

The note describes the construction:

"A brass electrical contact and a copper electrical contact are held face-to-face by a horizontal aluminum bolt. Between them sits a layer of PA-765, a tough, flame-resistant engineering plastic chosen for its material properties: it has an elastic modulus of 2 GPa and it begins to soften at 85°C."

The material figures are accurately drawn from the manufacturer's datasheet (see below). The same Chi Mei POLYLAC PA-765 datasheet also lists an unannealed heat-deflection temperature of 73.0°C, a lower figure the note does not mention. The note also gives two different thermal figures for the same material grade in two components without explaining their relationship: page 2 says the terminal's PA-765 layer "begins to soften at 85°C," while Appendix B (page 11) says the enclosure's "PA-765 ABS" has "a high storage modulus below its glass transition temperature of 105°C." For the record, the Berdner complaint describes a "stainless steel bolt and copper busbar" where the note and Dragonfly's own trade-libel complaint describe an aluminum bolt; the two pleadings conflict on the bolt metal.

On electrical performance, the note states the assembly resistance is "less than 200 microohms" and that "the terminal has been shown to remain under 200 microohms for over ten years of normal use." The arithmetic is exact and the resistance figure is achievable (see below); the ten-year resistance history is a company measurement for which the document publishes no supporting data.

The creep claim cites a real paper. The note says a 2012 study by Suk Choon Kang "determined the creep limit of ABS under normal operating conditions to be 30 MPa, at least an order of magnitude greater than in our system." The Kang paper exists with the exact citation given, and its abstract states that "the creep limit of ABS at room temperature is 80 % of tensile strength"; against the PA-765 datasheet's 38.1 MPa tensile yield, 80 percent works out to 30.5 MPa, so the 30 MPa figure has a basis. The same abstract continues that "the creep limits decreased to linearly as the temperatures increased, up to which is the softening temperature": the 30 MPa value is a room-temperature number, and the cited study's own finding is that the limit falls toward zero as temperature approaches the softening point. The note instead writes, "We operate far below the creep limit as long as the temperature stays below 85°C."

The note's own chart shows the temperature dependence. Figure 1 (page 3) plots the Kang creep limit at approximately 34.8 MPa at 20°C and 28.5 MPa at 40°C, falling to approximately 1.5 MPa at 100°C, with the "Battle Born Operating Zone" marked at roughly 4.8 MPa at 40°C. 28.5 MPa against 4.8 MPa is a factor of about six, against the prose's "at least an order of magnitude." The material numbers are right; the cited study's temperature finding, and the note's own chart, both show the margin shrinking as the terminal heats toward its 85°C trigger.

Interrupt physics at 12 volts

The note's mechanism story is that when the plastic softens, "aluminum’s most important electrical property takes over. Aluminum oxidizes," and the remaining contact points are "rapidly and progressively extinguished by their own chemistry" until the joint sits in a permanent high-resistance state. On voltage, it argues:

"At 120V, sustained arcs can repeatedly disrupt the formation of oxide layers, enabling a runaway cycle. At 12V, sustaining an arc across a growing insulating interface is more difficult, and once a stable oxide layer forms, the available voltage is insufficient to re-establish conduction. The mechanism that was problematic at 120V is permanently self-extinguishing at 12V."

The fire-research literature on loose connections documents a failure mode that needs no arc at all: the "glowing connection," in which a loose joint's oxide layer becomes a sustained, incandescent heating element. The National Bureau of Standards studied it in 1977, establishing glows between copper wires, between aluminum wires, and between copper and aluminum wires, with one laboratory connection sustaining a glow for over 100 hours. On power: "At times in excess of 35 watts were dissipated." On voltage, the study reports it did not need 120 volts: "Glows have also been established with low voltage d-c (under 10 volts)". Forty years later, J.J. Shea measured the same phenomenon at the IEEE Holm Conference on Electrical Contacts, the same conference series the note itself cites, reporting that "glowing connections can occur in DC circuits at voltages as low as 12Vdc" for copper and steel conductors in 12, 24, and 48 volt DC circuits up to 10 amps.

The arcing half of the claim runs into the system's actual voltage. For sustained arcs, published contact-physics data puts the threshold inside the battery's operating range: a 1966 Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers study of sparking and arcing at electrical contacts states that "When the minimum voltage for a drawn arc (10-20V) appears across separating contacts, an arc is drawn out, and appreciable damage is caused to the contacts." A "12 volt" battery does not sit at 12 volts when charging: Battle Born's own BB10012 datasheet specifies an absorption charging voltage of "14.2V to 14.6V", and its 2017 manual tells owners "the ideal voltage is between 14.2v-14.6v." A charging terminal therefore operates at 14.2 to 14.6 volts, within the published 10 to 20 volt range for drawn arcs. The note also describes 12-volt arcing itself: two pages after declaring the mechanism "permanently self-extinguishing at 12V" (Section 2, page 4), its Section 3 (page 5) describes lid-off behavior as "repeated arcing as current is briefly interrupted and re-established at each new contact point."

On the dissimilar-metal pairing, the note says the aluminum-copper interface "is sealed and dry inside the battery" and that "at 12V it becomes an asset, driving the protective oxide cascade faster and more completely than a same-metal interface would." The marine electrical standard for battery wiring takes the opposite position on the metal itself. ABYC E-9, the American Boat and Yacht Council's DC-systems standard in its federally incorporated 1990 edition, states at E-9.16.k(3): "Metals used for the terminal studs, nuts and washers shall be corrosion resistant and galvanically compatible with the conductor and terminal lug. Aluminum and unplated steel shall not be used for studs, nuts and washers." Ed Sherman, writing for Professional BoatBuilder in 2016 while on ABYC's staff, quotes the current E-11 standard carrying the same clause nearly word for word: "Aluminum and un-plated steel shall not be used for studs, nuts, and washers." As for the "sealed and dry" premise, the note cites ten years of field data for it without publishing any of that data; Prowse, opening one collected battery marketed as waterproof, found substantial moisture and rust inside it on camera (January 30, 2026, at 3:52).

The note predicts the contact points extinguish themselves; the NBS and Shea measurements document loose copper-aluminum joints sustaining glowing, watt-level heating instead, at DC voltages below the battery's. A boat-wiring standard names aluminum as a metal that shall not be used for terminal studs and nuts, the battery charges within the published 10 to 20 volt range for drawn arcs, and the note describes repeated 12-volt arcing two pages after declaring it self-extinguishing.

Lid-removal argument

The note's answer to the video footage is that opening the battery created the failure being filmed:

"When the lid is removed from a damaged pack, the brass terminal is no longer affixed by the epoxy bond to the structure. With the terminal free to move, the torque from the attached cables drives continuous relative motion between the brass terminal and the aluminum bolt. ... The result is repeated arcing as current is briefly interrupted and re-established at each new contact point. This appears dramatic on video, but is an artifact of the disassembly, not a characteristic of the intact assembly."

The dated record shows the hazard behavior in sealed, intact units:

• The battery that started the series read 250°F at the terminal and showed heat-discolored epoxy while still sealed; Prowse displays the discoloration on camera before opening the unit (December 10, 2025, at 1:05).
• Prowse then bought a new 100Ah unit with his own money and cycled it sealed, within the datasheet's ratings; its case melted at the negative side after 30 cycles, a controlled test Hackaday covered in print: "After letting the battery cool down and trying again with 80 A discharge current the negative terminal side of the enclosure began to melt ..."
• His instrumented 75Ah cycle test ran the battery sealed for its entire 99-hour life and opened it only after it died (March 16, 2026, at 9:45); Hackaday's coverage notes it was "charged and discharged at a mere 49A, well below its rated 100A."
• Independently of Prowse's bench, the RV creator Grand Adventure documented four of his own six in-service, sealed 100Ah units failing in his battery bank.
• Battle Born's own Section 4 test used "three sealed new BB10012 batteries," lid on, drove the terminals to 121°C, and left all three permanently unable to deliver meaningful power.

Sealed units failed in an owner's installation, in Prowse's lid-on bench tests, and in Battle Born's own lid-on test. The lid-removal explanation addresses what the arcing demonstrations looked like on camera; the overheating and failures listed above occurred with the lids in place.

Battle Born's internal tests

A frame from Will Prowse's instrumented 75Ah cycle test ("Battleborn Battery Investigation," March 16, 2026): the cycle-machine graphs recording disconnect events that accumulated to roughly 23,000 over 99 hours, a dataset he published for download.

Section 4 of the note reports the company's own fault test:

"we performed the test with three sealed new BB10012 batteries by purposefully undersizing the cables to create heat at the terminals. Running a continuous 100A current through undersized cable generated a peak temperature of 121°C at the terminal, high enough to trigger the interrupt mechanism."

The note adds that "the interrupt mechanism was triggered repeatably at around 35 minutes" and that "None of the three batteries was able to deliver meaningful power after the test." No one outside the company can check this test: the document never states the gauge of the undersized cable, and it contains no torque specifications anywhere in its 11 pages. What the test concedes is checkable. 121°C converts to 250°F, the same terminal temperature the Berdner complaint pleads for batteries overheating in ordinary use, and the test's outcome, three permanently dead batteries from an undersized cable at the battery's own rated current, is the company's own data. Prowse's attributed consumer-impact point, made on camera in the April 9, 2026 rebuttal (at 5:57 and 14:53): even a working version of this protection permanently destroys the battery and leaves the owner nothing to reset or replace. His counter-dataset is also on the record: roughly 23,000 logged disconnect events on the 75Ah unit, each one followed by current flowing again, published as downloadable cycle-machine data.

The control test makes a cable claim that conflicts with the company's own guidance:

"when correctly sized 1/0 AWG cable was used at the maximum continuous rated current of 100A, the terminal temperature never exceeded 43°C and the battery cycled indefinitely without any softening of the terminal."

Battle Born's own published cable-sizing page states, "This chart we created gives the appropriate wire size to stay within acceptable voltage drop and current limits." Battle Born's published chart shows, on its 90 to 100 amp row, 2 AWG for runs out to 20 feet, with 1/0 AWG first appearing at runs of 20 feet or more. Prowse makes the same point on camera in the April 9 rebuttal (at 9:14): 2 AWG copper is adequate for 100 amps continuous, and the 1/0 recommendation appears nowhere in Battle Born's data sheet.

Neither test is replicable as published. The fault test documents the company's protection destroying its own batteries at 250°F, and the cable the control test calls "correctly sized" is heavier than anything Battle Born's own chart requires at 100 amps for runs under 15 feet.

Warranty statistics and field record

The note's field-data paragraph:

"Between May 2022 and December 2025, Battle Born sold over 175,000 100Ah batteries. Just over 4,000 of these entered the warranty process. ... A fraction, just over 700 batteries, exhibited a positive terminal that could no longer deliver current: an interrupt event had been triggered. This represents approximately 0.4% of 100Ah batteries sold during that period, and approximately 0.2% of the total 100Ah installed base, which extends back to 2016."

Every figure in the paragraph comes from the company's own warranty database, which the note says begins in May 2022 with its current ERP system. Three things about the figures can be read off the document itself. First, the count is defined as terminals that "could no longer deliver current": a terminal that overheats while continuing to conduct, the scenario in the consumer complaints and in Prowse's 250°F and 202°F measurements, does not meet that definition. Second, the same 700 events are divided by two different denominators, sales during the May 2022 to December 2025 window for the 0.4 percent figure and an installed base "which extends back to 2016" for the 0.2 percent figure, and the note never states the installed-base count. Third, the 700 figure is qualified "to the company’s knowledge" on page 1 and restated without the qualifier on page 7 and in the conclusion.

Warranty returns also undercount whatever the true field number is when failed units never enter the process: Grand Adventure scrapped four failed batteries at a hazardous-waste facility rather than complete a warranty claims process he said required him to assume unacceptable risks and pay upfront inspection fees. Prowse's attributed answer to the statistics, in the April 9 rebuttal (at 14:28): the company cannot know the count because the failure leaves voltage present and is invisible without load-testing each battery individually, and he has watched warranty claims get denied.

The adjacent claim, which the note makes four times in varying terms, is most fully stated as: "Across that time, there have been no known instances of fire or cell damage caused by this design in the field." No fire has been documented, and the defense section of this page does not claim one. The rest of the record sits outside the sentence's three qualifiers ("known," "caused by this design," "cell damage"): Hackaday's coverage of Prowse's autopsy of 15 field-failed units describes "the typical molten plastic at the terminals" plus widespread loose internal wiring, and a 300-amp industrial Battle Born model that vented a cell during his testing; and the Berdner complaint pleads the terminal defect as "a serious fire hazard and safety risk." Melted enclosures, a vented cell in a sibling model, and a pleaded fire hazard are all on the record; none of them is a documented fire, and none of them is counted by the sentence as written.

Terminal interrupt as a backstop to the BMS

Appendix B places the terminal in a layered-protection architecture:

"The positive terminal interrupt described in the body of this note is a passive, last-resort backstop for conditions in which the BMS has already acted or has been bypassed."

The documented behavior in the failures on record is different. Hackaday's report on the 75Ah cycle test states that despite the rapid disconnects and observed thermal issues, the BMS never put the battery into any kind of safe mode as other LFP batteries do, while the plastic melted. Prowse's attributed comparisons, on camera: budget competitor batteries he tests in parallel latch off on a high-temperature event and stay off until conditions clear, where the Battle Born disconnected and reconnected up to multiple times per second (March 16, 2026, at 8:06 and 13:03); and in the GC3 teardown he shows a single taped-on temperature sensor where a competitor at a fraction of the price carries four sensors bolted to its bus bars (May 20, 2026, at 5:25).

The note presents the destructive interrupt as a second layer behind an active first line of defense. In the failures on the record, the documented BMS behavior was rapid disconnection and reconnection, not a protective latch-off, while the terminal heated toward the 121°C the company's own test measured.

When the safety-feature claim first appeared

The note's FAQ contains an admission that frames this whole timeline: "We also made a deliberate decision to share details of our terminal design that we would not ordinarily disclose publicly. This is proprietary engineering, and we do not take that decision lightly." The dated public record before and after December 10, 2025:

• 2017. The BB10012 Manual and Installation Guide (PDF created August 16, 2017) covers the BMS's voltage and temperature protections, including the 14.2 to 14.6 volt charging range and the 14.7 to 15.0 volt high-voltage cutoff. No terminal safety function appears in it.
• November 12, 2020. The press release launching the heated BB10012H, as published on dragonflyenergy.com (earliest located Wayback capture April 11, 2026), describes the internal heating system, the BMS cold-temperature charging restriction, the 10-year warranty, and the line "Considered to be the pinnacle of quality and safety at an unbeatable price point." No terminal safety function appears.
• July 28, 2022. The Heat Enable Instruction Guide (edition HIM_HeatedRev007_07282022) instructs installers to tighten terminal connections with a "torque wrench set to 10 ft-lbs." No terminal safety function appears.
• June 5, 2023. Dragonfly's Form S-1 discusses product safety through lithium-ion cell risk factors, recall risk, LFP chemistry positioning, the proprietary BMS, and third-party validation "by a third-party lab, which includes UL Standard 2054, IEC 62133 and the UN 38.3 shipping certification." The word "terminal" does not appear in the filing's text.
• December 28, 2023. Dragonfly's patent application US 2023/0420204 A1, "Thermal Fuse" (filed June 23, 2023), publishes. It describes a thermal interrupt built on a different, reversible principle: "Based on a difference in the thermal coefficients of expansion, the insulating component may expand axially relative to the electrodes with increasing temperature," so the device may "transition between an open and closed configuration" as temperature rises and falls. The technical note's production terminal works the opposite way, by a polymer that softens and a shutdown that is "permanent and irreversible by design."
• July 29, 2024 (page revision date; archived December 10, 2025). The Tiffin Motorhomes component manual for the Dragonfly DFGC3 instructs: "Use a torque wrench to torque your hardware to the specification of 9 to 11 ft-lbs. Failure to adequately secure connections can result in severe damage and will void your warranty." Its safety content is generic electrical-handling warnings and the BMS. No terminal safety function appears.
• December 10, 2025. Prowse publishes "Battleborn 12V Battery: Major Safety Issue," documenting the 250°F positive terminal on a sealed customer battery.
• December 11, 2025. Prowse reads on camera a customer-service email from Battle Born representative Matthew Adams defending the terminal as a thermal failsafe, and rebuts it line by line.
• December 18, 2025. RV Travel reports the dispute and prints the Adams email span, describing the "aluminum nut design as being a purpose-built thermal failsafe. It is engineered so that the plastic deforms and disconnects when excess heat is present at the terminal."
• February 13, 2026. Berdner et al. v. Dragonfly Energy Holdings Corp. is filed in Sonoma County Superior Court, pleading the positive terminal as a uniform design defect and fire hazard.
• March 16, 2026. Prowse publishes the instrumented "Battleborn Battery Investigation" with the roughly 23,000-disconnect dataset.
• March 30, 2026. Dragonfly files its fiscal-year 2025 Form 10-K, disclosing the Berdner action and stating the company "has yet to be served with the complaint"; no terminal-as-safety-feature language appears in the filing. The same day is the technical-note PDF's internal creation date.
• March 31, 2026. Battle Born publishes the technical note: the earliest located formal company document describing the mechanism, naming PA-765 and the 85°C softening point.
• April 9, 2026. Prowse publishes his section-by-section rebuttal of the note.
• April 15, 2026. A Battle Born blog post, "Battery Safety by Design," becomes the earliest located standard marketing page to list "A purpose-built thermal disconnect at the positive terminal" and "Sacrificial electrical components intended to fail safely under abnormal conditions."
• June 1, 2026. Dragonfly sues Prowse for trade libel in Washoe County, Nevada (see above).
• By June 7, 2026. Battle Born's "Safety Facts" page (undated; first Wayback capture June 7, 2026) describes "a passive thermal interrupt in the positive terminal" as "included specifically to meet UL 2054 certification requirements for commercial RV installations through the RVIA (Recreational Vehicle Industry Association)." That UL-2054-requirement rationale appears nowhere in the March 31 technical note.

None of the six dated company artifacts above that precede December 10, 2025, the 2017 manual, the 2020 launch press release, the 2022 heat-enable guide, the 2023 Form S-1, the 2023 "Thermal Fuse" patent application, and the Tiffin DFGC3 component manual, describes the 100Ah positive terminal as performing any safety function. The earliest located dated public description of the terminal as a safety device is the Adams customer-service email, read on camera by Prowse on December 11, 2025 and quoted in print by RV Travel on December 18, 2025, one day and eight days after the first video; the March 31, 2026 technical note is the earliest located formal company documentation of the mechanism.

Points where the technical note is accurate

In fairness, several of the note's claims check out against the primary sources. They share one trait. Each is accurate about something no one in this dispute contests, or about a bench standard that does not measure field reliability, and not one of them explains why packs used within Battle Born's own ratings overheated at the terminal:

• The ETL listing is real. The Intertek Directory of Listed Products carries the BB10012 and DF10012 as ETL Listed lithium-ion battery packs found to comply with UL 2054, exactly as the note claims.
• The test description matches the standard. The ten-sample structure, the 20°C and 55°C test temperatures, the single-fault application, and the no-fire requirement all match published excerpts of UL 2054.
• The biannual-inspection claim matches a published Intertek program. The note's statement that "Intertek enforces this policy through random biannual inspections of our manufacturing facility" is consistent with Intertek's Semi-Annual Follow Up Inspections Program for ETL Listed products, announced in October 2013 as "Reducing the number of inspections from four per year to two per year" for qualified manufacturers.
• The PA-765 figures are accurate, and quoted selectively. The note's 2 GPa modulus matches the Chi Mei POLYLAC PA-765 datasheet's 2,070 MPa flexural modulus, and its 85°C softening figure corresponds to the datasheet's annealed heat-deflection temperature of 83.0°C; as the terminal-materials analysis above notes, it passes over the same datasheet's lower unannealed figure of 73.0°C.
• The electrical arithmetic is exact, for a connection that holds. 200 microohms at 100 amps gives 20 millivolts and 2 watts, as stated, and a sub-200-microohm assembly is achievable: published busbar-joint benchmarks put a "Typical Healthy Joint" at "1-5 μΩ for properly torqued connections." The dispute is not about connections that stay tight. It is about a terminal that works loose, loses contact, and heats, the failure the documented units showed. Correct math for the healthy case says nothing about the failed one.
• The cited literature is real, and it describes the failure mode. The Kang 2012 creep study exists with the exact citation printed in the note, and its 80-percent-of-tensile-strength room-temperature creep limit gives 30.5 MPa against the datasheet's 38.1 MPa yield, grounding the note's 30 MPa figure. Oberst et al. 2019 is a real IEEE Holm Conference study of aging in bolted aluminum-copper joints, and current constriction at microscopic contact points, the proposition for which the note cites Holm's 1967 text, is established contact physics. These are the note's own authorities, and they describe creep in a polymer spacer and aging in a bolted aluminum-copper joint, the precise mechanism by which a terminal works loose and overheats. The note cites the physics of its own failure.
• The non-disclosure admission is accurate, and it cuts toward Prowse. The FAQ's statement that the terminal details are ones the company "would not ordinarily disclose publicly" matches the dated record: no company document before December 2025 describes the function (see the timeline above). By the company's own admission, the safety-feature explanation it now offers is one it had never put in writing until after the videos it sues over.
• The Appendix B chemistry and cell-architecture claims are not in dispute, because no one challenged them. The note's statements that LiFePO4 "is the most thermally stable lithium cell chemistry available for this application" and that with cylindrical cells "if a single cell degrades or fails, the pack continues to operate, whereas a prismatic cell failure typically takes the entire pack offline" are standard industry positioning; Prowse's section-by-section April 9 rebuttal contests the terminal, bus bar, certification, and statistics claims and takes no issue with these.

Granting the note every one of these points changes nothing about the suit. It is precise about undisputed chemistry, about a laboratory listing that does not test field reliability, and about arithmetic for a connection that stays tight. It offers no field-failure data and no account of the new, in-spec packs that overheated, which is the only question the lawsuit raises. A plaintiff holding proof that a reviewer's safety findings were false would not need to be this exact about everything except the failures.

Battle Born's charge-current specification for the 75Ah battery

Two Battle Born datasheets for the same BB1275 (75Ah) battery, page 3, Charging Specifications. Left: the datasheet on battlebornbatteries.com as of June 7, 2026, listing "Max Charge Current 37.5A". Right: the "BB1275 Standard Datasheet_V2", listing "Max Charge Current 50A", the file that was on battlebornbatteries.com when the Wayback Machine captured it on October 16, 2025 and that Defender still serves. Every other charging-specification row is identical.

One of the complaint's specific factual charges is that Prowse's instrumented test of the 75Ah battery overcharged it. The complaint pleads:

"Prowse's 'testing' is intentionally abusive and invalid. The abuses demonstrated in this video and accompanying released data include that (1) the charge current was simultaneously ~49A, 30% over the 37.5A maximum specified in the manual ..."

That charge depends on 37.5A being the maximum charge current Battle Born published for the battery. For the 75Ah BB1275, Battle Born has published two different figures.

The owner's manual and the datasheet currently on Battle Born's website state 37.5A. The datasheet at battlebornbatteries.com lists "Max Charge Current 37.5A", alongside a recommended charge current of ".5c", which for a 75Ah cell is 37.5A.

Battle Born has also published, for the same battery, a datasheet stating 50A. The document is internally titled "BB1275 Standard Datasheet_V2" and its page 3 lists "Max Charge Current 50A". That file was hosted on battlebornbatteries.com, where the Wayback Machine captured it on October 16, 2025, and the same file is currently served by Defender, a retailer that sells the battery. The two datasheets are identical page for page except for that one "Max Charge Current" figure.

The two figures bracket the test. Hackaday's coverage of the 75Ah test records that the battery was "charged and discharged at a mere 49A, well below its rated 100A." A charge of about 49A is below the 50A maximum stated in the datasheet that Battle Born's own site carried into October 2025 and that its retailer still serves, and above the 37.5A maximum stated in the manual and in the current datasheet. The complaint quotes Prowse's own account of the same point, that he ran the test "under the continuous charge current" and that the battery "was used within spec on the datasheet."

Prowse's own history with these batteries

Dragonfly's theory of motive is that Prowse turned on the batteries only after the money stopped. The dated record, including Dragonfly's own pleading, is more complicated than that narrative.

Prowse first tore down a Battle Born battery in November 2019, and praised it. The complaint quotes him from that video: "This passes all of the tests. Okay. Finally, we have a good battery. I can actually recommend it." The complaint also concedes that this 2019 video was unpaid and that Battle Born was unaware of it before he posted it. Dragonfly pleads that an affiliate relationship ran from January 2019 to October 2025, that it paid Prowse a total of about $206,000 over those years, and that it deactivated his affiliate link in October 2025.

The complaint's own chronology does not line up cleanly with "criticism only after the deal ended." Dragonfly pleads that "[i]n August of 2025, Prowse began posting negative comments about Battle Born ... [and] began asking his forum members to send him defective or failed Battle Born Batteries," and that it deactivated his affiliate link in October 2025 "[i]n response to the growing negativity." On Dragonfly's own pleading, then, the criticism began while the affiliate relationship was still in place, and the company ended the relationship because of the criticism, not the other way around.

When Dragonfly suggested his early teardowns used abused or pre-damaged batteries, Prowse answered the point on camera by buying a new battery and cycling it within the manufacturer's stated ratings, and it failed; the technology outlet Hackaday covered that controlled test and its result. Throughout, he tore the batteries down on camera and published his underlying cycle-testing data for anyone to download, which is the factual record his conclusions rest on.

Nevada's anti-SLAPP statute is the primary shield

Nevada's anti-SLAPP law (NRS 41.635 through 41.670) exists to kill exactly this kind of suit early, and the Nevada Supreme Court has confirmed it reaches all four of Dragonfly's claims, not just the libel count, because the question is whether the claims are based on protected good-faith communication, not what the plaintiff labels them.

The protected category. NRS 41.637 defines a "good faith communication in furtherance of ... the right to free speech in direct connection with an issue of public concern." Its fourth category covers a communication made in direct connection with an issue of public interest in a public forum, so long as it is truthful or made without knowledge of its falsehood. A YouTube channel and the diysolarforum.com message board are public forums; fire and thermal-runaway risk in a product Dragonfly says it has deployed more than 400,000 times is an issue of public interest.

The special motion and the clock. NRS 41.660 authorizes a special motion to dismiss, which must be filed within 60 days after service of the complaint, a deadline the court may extend only for good cause. The 60-day window, measured from the date Prowse is personally served, is the most important date in the case.

Burden shifting and the discovery stay. On the motion, the defendant first shows by a preponderance that the claim is based on a protected good-faith communication; the burden then flips to the plaintiff to show, with prima facie evidence, a probability of prevailing. Filing the motion stays discovery while it, and any appeal, is pending. That defeats the usual playbook of a well-funded plaintiff: Dragonfly cannot bury Prowse in depositions and document demands to raise his costs while the motion is decided. The Nevada Supreme Court reviews these rulings de novo and has confirmed the two-prong structure.

The downside for Dragonfly. If Prowse wins the motion, the court must award him reasonable costs and attorney's fees, may award up to $10,000 on top of that, and a denial is immediately appealable, which keeps the discovery stay in place during the appeal.

A battery review is an issue of public interest. Nevada uses the guiding principles in Shapiro v. Welt to decide that question, asking among other things whether the subject concerns a substantial number of people rather than a purely personal grievance. Dragonfly's own marketing answers it: the company states it has deployed more than 400,000 batteries across RV, marine, off-grid, and heavy-duty applications. Online consumer reviews get the same treatment in the case law, because "consumer information that goes beyond a particular interaction between the parties and implicates matters of public concern that can affect many people is generally deemed to involve an issue of public interest."

Meeting prong one. Prowse's initial showing can be made largely by his own sworn declaration laying out his methodology and stating that he believed his conclusions were true when he published, which Nevada case law treats as sufficient at prong one absent conflicting evidence.

The trade libel claim has built-in weak points

By suing for trade libel rather than personal defamation, Dragonfly took on a heavier burden. Nevada business disparagement requires a false and disparaging statement, unprivileged publication, malice, and special damages.

Special damages must be pleaded with specifics. This is the soft spot in the complaint. Special damages in a disparagement case are not presumed; they must be pleaded with specificity under Nevada Rule of Civil Procedure 9(g). Dragonfly's complaint pleads only an aggregate "drop-off" in sales, OEM customers it does not name, and a high "volume of calls," with no particular lost sale, no canceled order tied to a particular statement, and no dollar figure. The closest precedent is the structural twin of this case: in Isuzu Motors Ltd. v. Consumers Union, a vehicle maker sued a consumer-review organization over a critical test, and the court dismissed every product-disparagement claim because the maker pleaded its losses in the aggregate, holding that the claim "requires pleading and proof of special damages in the form of pecuniary loss" and that the claims "fail to allege special damages with the specificity required by Fed.R.Civ.P. 9(g)." Courts apply the rule routinely, dismissing trade-libel claims that plead lost sales without naming the customers and transactions lost, and as recently as September 2025 a court granted summary judgment against a disparagement plaintiff that could not prove specific lost transactions.

Fact versus opinion. A conclusion drawn out loud from facts shown to the audience is opinion, not a false statement of fact. The controlling Nevada authority on this exact pattern is PETA v. Bobby Berosini, Ltd., where the claimed defamation came packaged with the videotape that showed the audience the very conduct being criticized, and the statements were protected because the facts were on the tape for the viewer to judge:

everyone involved has seen the "movie"; and all the facts upon which opinions were based were "disclosed" in the videotape itself...

That is Prowse's case almost on all fours. He shows his teardown, his test rig, and his data on camera, then says the pack is unsafe, and a viewer can look at the same footage and disagree, which is the test for protected opinion. A technical conclusion drawn from data the speaker put in front of the audience is not the kind of "fact" that can be proven false in a defamation case, as the Second Circuit held for disclosed scientific data in ONY, Inc. v. Cornerstone Therapeutics and the Third Circuit held for a conclusion drawn from nonfraudulent published data in Pacira. Dragonfly's complaint concedes the point in passing when it pleads that "Prowse's own published data from the video shows that the battery delivers full-rated capacity under proper conditions," an acknowledgment that the data was published for the audience to weigh.

Truth, and who has to prove it. Truth is a complete defense, and for public-concern speech the burden of proving falsity is the plaintiff's, not the speaker's. Dragonfly does not get to demand that Prowse prove his tests were perfect; it has to prove the core message, that these packs can overheat and fail dangerously, is materially false, against the record described above.

Actual malice is a state of mind about truth, not a motive. Dragonfly's whole narrative rests on financial motive, but the Supreme Court has drawn the line three times. A profit motive does not prove actual malice, or the body of First Amendment libel law "would be little more than empty vessels." Spite and ill will are not actual malice. And lower courts have rejected the precise profit-and-grudge mix Dragonfly pleads: "[e]vidence of a defendant's ill will, desire to injure, or political or profit motive does not suffice." Nevada applies the same definition, requiring that the speaker entertained serious doubts about the truth.

The deceptive-trade-practices claim is the libel claim relabeled

The second count, under the Nevada Deceptive Trade Practices Act, fails for three independent reasons.

First, the statute does not reach a reviewer. NRS 598.0915 defines a "deceptive trade practice" only when committed "in the course of his or her business or occupation," and the disparagement subsection targets a person who "[d]isparages the goods, services or business of another person by false or misleading representation of fact" in that course of business, meaning a competing seller, not a third-party critic. Prowse is not in the business of selling batteries. A reviewer who evaluates a product he does not sell is not engaged in commercial advertising or promotion at all.

Second, a plaintiff cannot escape the First Amendment by relabeling a libel claim. The constitutional limits that protect speech "apply to all claims whose gravamen is the alleged injurious falsehood of a statement," and a plaintiff "may not use related causes of action to avoid the constitutional requisites of a defamation claim." The Ninth Circuit applied that rule to a product-review case, holding that the disparagement and tortious-interference counts "are subject to the same first amendment requirements that govern actions for defamation," and the Tenth Circuit reached the same result for business-tort claims built on protected opinion. The deceptive-practices count is the trade-libel count by another name, and it inherits the same falsity burden, the same opinion protection, and the same fate.

Third, the anti-SLAPP statute reaches it anyway, because the Nevada Supreme Court looks at the protected statements underlying a claim rather than the claim's label.

The interference claim rises and falls with the libel claim

The third count, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, requires Dragonfly to prove a prospective relationship, the defendant's knowledge of it, intent to harm by preventing it, the absence of privilege or justification, and resulting harm.

The fourth element is where the claim breaks. Constitutionally protected speech cannot be the wrongful means that supplies the "absence of privilege or justification," because the First Amendment bars tort liability for the economic consequences of protected speech. The Supreme Court reversed a state-court interference judgment built on protected boycott advocacy, holding that "[s]peech does not lose its protected character ... simply because it may embarrass others or coerce them into action." An interference claim built on the same publication as a failed defamation claim falls with it, because its gravamen is still the alleged injurious falsehood of a statement. If Dragonfly cannot prove Prowse's statements were false and made with the required fault, it cannot convert the same speech into a damages award by calling it interference.

The affiliate money is a distraction, not a claim

Dragonfly leans on the roughly $206,000 in past affiliate commissions and banner advertising, the earlier praise, and a statement it attributes to Prowse in an April 2026 video that the only thing he received from the company was "four free batteries." None of that is a defense-killer.

First, motive is not falsity. Whether Prowse profited from ad revenue or once took affiliate fees has nothing to do with whether a pack actually overheats; at most it bears on malice, which only matters if Dragonfly first proves the statements false.

Second, the alleged denial is collateral. Trade libel must rest on a false statement about the plaintiff's product, not about the speaker's own affairs. Nevada defines the tort as injurious falsehoods "aimed at the business's goods or services," and the Ninth Circuit states the same boundary the Nevada Supreme Court adopted, that trade libel is "not directed at the plaintiff's personal reputation but rather at the goods a plaintiff sells." A statement by Prowse about whether he had an affiliate relationship is a statement about Prowse, not about the battery, and it fails the "of and concerning the product" requirement that limits this tort. A defendant may also invoke anti-SLAPP protection even while disputing that he made the specific statement attributed to him.

The injunction and takedown request is an unconstitutional prior restraint

Dragonfly's fourth count asks the court both to bar Prowse from making "further" statements it considers false and to order him to remove the videos, posts, thumbnails, and comments he has already published. Both halves are controlled by Nevada Supreme Court authority, and both lose. In Weller v. Eighth Judicial District Court, the court vacated a preliminary injunction that barred a speaker from making "false or defamatory" statements, holding that such a pre-merits order is an unconstitutional prior restraint because it "freezes [the speaker's] ability to exercise her freedom-of-speech rights." The federal baseline is the same: an individual's interest in being free from public criticism of his business does not "warrant[] use of the injunctive power of a court," and prior restraints carry a heavy presumption of unconstitutionality. Federal appellate courts have vacated injunctions phrased against "defamatory" speech as prior restraints, on the settled maxim that "equity will not enjoin a libel." The narrow exception some courts recognize reaches only specific statements already adjudicated false after a full trial, which is the opposite of what Dragonfly seeks. The demand to take down videos that no court has found false is, if anything, the broader and more clearly unconstitutional half of the request.

Why this stays in Nevada state court

Dragonfly is a Nevada citizen, and Prowse and Prowse Publications LLC are pleaded as Nevada citizens as well. With both sides in the same state there is no complete diversity, so the case cannot be removed to federal court and stays in state court, where Nevada applies the full anti-SLAPP statute, including the automatic discovery stay and the preponderance standard, without the federal-court complications that have tangled anti-SLAPP motions in the Ninth Circuit.

Claim by claim

Trade libel (count one). The falsity charge runs into the plaintiff's burden of proof and the reviewer-truth line of Bose and Unelko, against a record that is substantially true and partly conceded by the complaint. The "abusive testing" charge runs into the disclosed-facts opinion doctrine of Berosini and Partington, because Prowse tore the batteries down on camera and published his data. The malice-by-money charge runs into the rule that motive is not actual malice. The special-damages charge runs into the Isuzu pleading line, because Dragonfly pleads only aggregate harm.

Deceptive trade practices (count two). Outside the statute, which reaches deceptive practices by a seller in the course of business, not a reviewer's commentary, and barred by the rule against relabeling a libel claim, and reachable by the anti-SLAPP motion regardless.

Intentional interference (count three). Defeated at the "absence of privilege" element, because protected speech cannot be the wrongful means, and duplicative of the libel claim, with which it stands or falls.

Injunctive relief (count four). An unconstitutional prior restraint under Weller, both as to the forward ban and as to the demand to remove already-published videos.

The adverse cases, and how each is answered

A complete picture has to confront the authorities Dragonfly will use. None changes the bottom line.

Mixed opinion implying undisclosed facts. Nevada Independent Broadcasting Corp. v. Allen holds that an opinion implying undisclosed defamatory facts can be actionable. It is the wrong category here, because Prowse disclosed the teardown, the test rig, and the data on camera, so his conclusion is an evaluation of disclosed facts, governed by Berosini and Partington.

Older Nevada injunction authority. Guion v. Terra Marketing affirmed an injunction against false anti-business signage in 1974. It is superseded on the constitutional point by Weller (2020), the controlling and far more recent decision applying prior-restraint scrutiny to vacate exactly this kind of pre-merits order.

A disparagement claim that survived dismissal. In Nakamura v. Sunday Group a Nevada federal court let a business-disparagement claim proceed. The distinction is the pleading: that plaintiff pleaded concrete, itemized monetary outlays, while Dragonfly pleads only general reputational and financial harm, which still fails under Isuzu.

What Will should do now

1. Retain Nevada anti-SLAPP counsel immediately. This is a Nevada state-court matter that needs a lawyer licensed in Nevada who has filed special motions to dismiss under NRS 41.660. The 60-day clock starts at service and it is short, and the fee-shifting provision is the argument for counsel who will take it on favorable terms.
2. Calendar the service date the moment it happens. Nothing matters more than knowing the exact day Prowse is served, because the special-motion deadline runs from it.
3. Issue a litigation hold today. Preserve everything related to the videos, the testing, and the affiliate relationship, including the physical battery packs, the raw footage, and the cycle-testing data, and stop any routine deletion.
4. Do not delete or re-edit the existing videos. Taking them down now looks like consciousness of guilt and destroys the best evidence of what was actually disclosed to viewers. They are the record.
5. Do not respond substantively without counsel. Anything Prowse says publicly about the suit can be quoted back; the published data already speaks for itself.

Bottom line

This is a four-count suit by a public company against an individual reviewer over speech about product safety, seeking both to gag him and to erase his videos. Nevada law is unusually well-suited to answering it. The fast move is a special motion to dismiss under NRS 41.660 inside the 60-day window, which reaches all four counts under Panik, stays discovery, and shifts the burden to Dragonfly to prove, with real evidence, that Prowse's statements were false and that he made them knowing they were false. The falsity element runs into a record that is substantially true and partly conceded by the complaint itself; the deceptive-practices and interference counts are the libel claim relabeled and fall with it; the special-damages pleading is the Isuzu kind; and the injunction-and-takedown request is a prior restraint under Weller.