*Rod Ponton, the Presidio County, Texas lawyer whose inability to turn off his cat filter during a Zoom court appearance went viral, is not on Twitter, and had no idea he had become a worldwide sensation until he started getting bombarded with calls from reporters – barely an hour after the hearing ended, according to the New York Times.
The judge in his case had tweeted out a link to the mishap on the court’s YouTube page. Ponton’s feline appearance lasted less than a minute before he figured out how to turn the filter off, but it has brought untold hours of joy to viewers across the globe.
Ponton, who was representing the State of Texas in a civil forfeiture case, said he was using his secretary’s computer and that she was “mortified” by the mistake.
Watch below:
As for his cat-tastrophe being tweeted out by the judge without his knowledge, Ponton took it in good spirits.
“If I can make the country chuckle for a moment in these difficult times they’re going through, I’m happy to let them do that at my expense,” he told the NYT in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.
This isn’t Ponton’s first brush with fame. The NYT reports that he appeared in the final episode of the Netflix series, “The Confession Killer,” in 2019, about the convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to more than 600 murders in the 1980s, according to The Big Bend Sentinel. Ponton had represented Lucas in a murder trial in El Paso, Texas, in 1986 and described the accused as “the guy telling the big lie, sort of winking at everybody. He turned into a quote unquote evil celebrity.”
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