How Sean Buckner and Ron Durbin Used Anti-SLAPP Statutes to Intimidate Ordinary People While Wrapping Themselves in the Constitution
Two men who built their public identities around fighting government abuse used a citizen protection law as a shield for their own threatening behavior toward private citizens. This is how they did it and why it matters.
Sean Buckner and Ron Durbin want you to believe they are constitutional warriors.
They want you to see them as the last line of defense between ordinary Americans and the overreaching boot of government authority. They film themselves confronting police officers, local officials, and government buildings. They post the videos online. They build followings of people who share their frustration with institutional corruption and abuse of power. They wrap every confrontation in the language of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution itself.
And then when an ordinary private citizen named Steven Wyers went to a Tulsa County courthouse in November 2025 and asked a judge to protect him from their conduct — they used the very legal system they claim to distrust to make that protection disappear.
They invoked the Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act. The state's anti-SLAPP law. A statute specifically designed to protect citizens from having their free speech silenced by powerful institutions using litigation as a weapon.
Two men who present themselves as fighters against powerful institutions used a citizen protection law to defeat a private individual who felt threatened enough by their behavior to go to court.
Let that contradiction sit with you for a moment.
What Anti-SLAPP Laws Are Actually For
To understand why what Buckner and Durbin did is so significant you first need to understand what anti-SLAPP laws were designed to do and who they were designed to protect.
SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. A SLAPP suit is a lawsuit filed not to win in court but to silence, intimidate, and financially exhaust someone who has exercised their free speech rights. The classic SLAPP scenario involves a powerful corporation or wealthy individual suing a small community activist, a local journalist, or an ordinary citizen who has spoken out against them. The lawsuit does not need to have merit. Its purpose is to drown the target in legal fees and fear until they stop speaking.
Anti-SLAPP laws were created to stop that abuse. They allow defendants to quickly dismiss lawsuits that target protected speech or petition activities before the financial damage of prolonged litigation can silence them. Oklahoma's Citizens Participation Act — the statute Buckner and Durbin invoked — is Oklahoma's version of that protection.
It is a good law. It serves an important purpose. It protects whistleblowers. It protects journalists. It protects community activists. It protects ordinary citizens who speak out against powerful interests and find themselves targeted with retaliatory litigation.
It was not designed to protect two grown men who had frightened a private citizen badly enough that he felt he needed a court order to keep them away from him.
Who Is Steven Wyers and What Did He Experience
Steven Wyers filed a petition for a protective order against William Sean Buckner and Ronald E. Durbin II in Tulsa County District Court on November 26 2025.
A protective order is not a casual legal filing. It is not something people do on a whim. To obtain a protective order a petitioner must appear before a court and attest under oath that they have experienced harassment, threatening behavior, stalking, or conduct that causes them to fear for their safety or wellbeing. Courts take these filings seriously. They require evidence. They require testimony. They require a showing of need.
Steven Wyers went through all of that. He hired an attorney — Laurie Phillips. He filed his petition. He appeared for trial on January 8 2026. Two witnesses testified on his behalf — Tina Wyers and Russell Mills. Exhibits were submitted and admitted into evidence. He made his case before a judge.
What did Buckner and Durbin do in response to someone asking a court to protect them?
They filed a motion to dismiss under the Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act arguing that the conduct complained of was protected expression under the First Amendment.
In other words. Someone said they were afraid of these two men and asked a court for protection. And Buckner and Durbin responded by saying their behavior was free speech and the case should be thrown out.
The court agreed and dismissed the protective order on January 28 2026. But the court also specifically noted in its order that the filing was not frivolous. The judge looked at what Wyers presented and determined it was a legitimate filing with legitimate basis. The dismissal was a legal determination based on the anti-SLAPP statute. It was not a finding that Buckner and Durbin's conduct was acceptable or that Wyers's fears were unfounded.
The Ron Durbin Connection
Ron Durbin's presence as a co-defendant in this protective order case is not surprising to anyone who has followed this investigation. But for readers encountering him for the first time here is who he is.
Ron Durbin operated under the banner of Guerrilla Publishing out of Tulsa Oklahoma. He was connected to Sean Buckner through the First Amendment audit community — the network of individuals who film confrontations with government officials and post them online as a form of civic activism.
Durbin was an attorney. Was. He was disbarred by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in a seventy-one page ruling finding twenty separate counts of professional conduct violations. Twenty counts. The Oklahoma Supreme Court does not produce seventy-one page disbarment rulings for minor infractions. This was a comprehensive and thorough accounting of serious professional failures.
Despite his disbarment Durbin continued to operate in the First Amendment audit space alongside Buckner. Their joint activities in the Sallisaw area targeted local officials including City Manager Keith Skelton and Police Chief Terry Franklin — the same police chief Buckner would later name as a defendant in his federal civil rights lawsuit found frivolous unreasonable and groundless.
The fact that a private citizen sought a protective order against both Durbin and Buckner simultaneously tells us something important. Whatever conduct prompted Steven Wyers to go to court was conduct they were apparently engaging in together. Not separately. Together. Two men coordinating in ways that made another person feel unsafe enough to seek legal protection.
The Pattern of Using Legal Tools as Weapons
Here is what is most troubling about the anti-SLAPP dismissal in the Wyers case when placed in the context of everything else this investigation has documented.
Sean Buckner has a long and documented history of using legal processes not to seek justice but to intimidate and exhaust people he is in conflict with.
He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Sallisaw and two of its police officers over a traffic stop. A federal judge found that lawsuit frivolous unreasonable and groundless. The city's taxpayers bore the cost of defending it. The police officers bore the personal stress of being named defendants. The federal court system bore the burden of processing it. None of that was the point. The point was the filing itself and what it communicated to the people named in it.
He responded to this investigation by threatening to expose the private medical records of a private citizen blogger. That is not a legal action but it is the same impulse — using the threat of exposure, cost, and disruption to silence someone who is asking legitimate questions.
And now we know that in November 2025 he and Ron Durbin used an anti-SLAPP statute — a law designed to protect the little guy from powerful interests — to defeat a private citizen's attempt to obtain court protection from their behavior.
The pattern is consistent and revealing. Sean Buckner does not use legal tools to seek justice. He uses them to impose costs on the people who challenge him or resist him. When he is the one being challenged in court he invokes citizen protection statutes. When he is the one challenging others he files lawsuits that federal judges call frivolous.
The law is a tool for him. Not a system of justice he respects and operates within honestly. A tool. Available to be picked up and deployed in whatever direction serves his immediate interests.
The Constitutional Irony
There is a deep and troubling irony at the heart of the Buckner and Durbin story that deserves to be named directly.
These are two men who have built entire public identities around defending constitutional rights. The First Amendment. The Fourth Amendment. The right of ordinary citizens to stand up to government power. They film themselves invoking these rights. They lecture people about them. They attract followers who believe they are genuine champions of the constitutional order.
And then one of them gets disbarred for twenty counts of professional misconduct. And both of them behave in ways that cause a private citizen to seek court protection from them. And when that happens they invoke the First Amendment to make the protection go away.
The Constitution they perform their love for on camera becomes a shield against accountability the moment someone tries to hold them accountable.
That is not constitutional advocacy. That is constitutional cosplay. The performance of principled citizenship without the actual practice of it.
Real constitutional advocates do not need protective orders filed against them. Real defenders of citizen rights do not use citizen protection laws to defeat other citizens seeking protection. Real First Amendment champions do not respond to journalism with threats to expose the journalist's private medical records.
The gap between what Buckner and Durbin say they stand for and how they actually conduct themselves is not a small gap. It is a chasm. And the Wyers protective order case sits right in the middle of that chasm as documented evidence of who these men actually are when they are not performing for a camera.
What the Behavior Actually Looks Like
Let us be direct about what the public record describes when it comes to the conduct of Sean Buckner and Ron Durbin toward people they consider adversaries or targets.
They film confrontations. They post them publicly. They name individuals. They direct their audiences toward those individuals. They coordinate their activities. They show up at locations. They make their presence known in ways that are designed to be unsettling. They invoke legal processes to impose costs on people who push back. And when someone asks a court to make them stop they invoke the First Amendment.
This is not civic activism. This is a playbook for harassment that has been dressed up in constitutional language to make it look like something it is not.
Civic activists change things. They attend public meetings. They run for office. They organize communities. They build coalitions. They advocate for policy. They hold officials accountable through transparent and constructive engagement with democratic processes.
Buckner and Durbin do not do those things. They film. They post. They confront. They intimidate. They litigate. And they call it freedom.
Steven Wyers went to a courthouse and said he needed protection from their behavior. The court dismissed his petition on legal grounds but found it was not frivolous. Whatever he experienced was real enough to compel a judge to take it seriously even while ruling against him on the statutory question.
That matters. The court's non-frivolousness finding is not a minor footnote. It is a judicial acknowledgment that the conduct that drove Wyers to court was genuinely concerning even if the anti-SLAPP statute ultimately protected it.
Sean Buckner Is Running for the United States Senate
All of this — the protective order, the anti-SLAPP dismissal, the Durbin connection, the pattern of using legal tools as weapons — is the record of a man who is currently asking Oklahoma voters to send him to Washington.
A United States Senator has extraordinary power over the legal system he would now be trying to manipulate at a much larger scale. He votes on federal court nominees. He votes on the budgets of the agencies that enforce the laws. He sits on committees that oversee the Department of Justice. He can use the power of a Senate seat to impose costs on institutions and individuals in ways that make a frivolous federal lawsuit look like a minor inconvenience.
The pattern of behavior documented in this investigation — using legal processes not for justice but for intimidation and cost imposition — is not a pattern you want in someone with Senate-level power. It is a pattern that becomes significantly more dangerous when the person wielding it has access to the mechanisms of federal government.
Steven Wyers went to a Tulsa courthouse and asked for protection from Sean Buckner.
Oklahoma voters have until June 16 to decide whether they want to give Sean Buckner the power of a United States Senate seat.
The choice between those two things could not be more stark.
A Note on Ron Durbin
Ron Durbin is not a candidate for public office. He is not the subject of this investigation. He appears in this article only to the extent that his documented connection to Sean Buckner — including as a co-defendant in the Wyers protective order case — is directly relevant to understanding the network of relationships and conduct patterns surrounding the man who is asking Oklahoma voters for their trust.
His disbarment is a matter of public record. His co-defendant status in the Wyers case is a matter of public record. His connection to the First Amendment audit community alongside Buckner is a matter of public record. All of it is presented here as documented context not as an independent investigation of Durbin himself.
The Wyers v. Buckner protective order case is documented in UniCourt public records as a civil case filed November 26 2025 in Tulsa County District Court Oklahoma. The docket entries cited in this article are drawn from that public record. The Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act referenced is codified at 12 O.S. sections 1430 through 1440. Ron Durbin's disbarment by the Oklahoma Supreme Court is a matter of public record. Sean Buckner's federal lawsuit finding of frivolous unreasonable and groundless is documented in Eastern District of Oklahoma case CIV-22-146-JAR.
Sean Buckner was given the opportunity to respond to the specific claims in this article prior to publication. As of publication time no response has been received. Any response will be published promptly and in full.
Dustin Terry is a blogger, citizen journalist, and veteran contributing to PublicCrime.com.
