Juan Carlos Vera is the former ACORN employee who was recorded illegally without his consent by James O’Keefe for those infamous Andrew Breitbart-funded “sting” videos, purportedly giving O’Keefe and Hannah Giles advice on how to bring teenage girls into the US from Mexico. Vera was fired in the hysteria that followed the O’Keefe video releases, even though he contacted authorities immediately after the incident.

Now O’Keefe has settled out of court, agreeing to pay Vera $100,000 and write an apology. Wonkette has the rest: Totally Blameless Crime-Stopper James O’Keefe to Pay $100,000 to ACORN Criminal.

For the benefit of readers who are neither bitter and aggrieved former ACORN employees nor forum moderators at Democratic Underground, a short summary: ACORN was a community organizing group that became the locus of phantasmically baroque conspiracy theorizing in the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, first by the usual sad idiots, but inevitably by the seemingly rational journalists who must cover the sad idiots to pay their mortgages. ACORN attracted this negative attention, in part, because of its large and effective voter registration drives, which enfranchised record numbers of minority and low-income voters, who are demographically likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates. The sad idiots believed there was a collusion scheme between ACORN and a former employee of the group, who happened to be that year’s Democratic Presidential candidate: a ferocious IRA terrorist-sympathizer named Barrance Hussein O’Malley. In reality, ACORN’s decades-long campaigns to raise the minimum wage and their battles against predatory lenders had simply invited the animus of powerful business interests—who fund the media activities of sad idiots and rule the planet for like-minded reptilianoid pedophile Illuminatus from the 4th Dimension.

Juan Carlos Vera worked at the National City offices of ACORN in California.

In 2009, two twenty-something conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, hoped to expose criminal malfeasance at ACORN by filming Vera without his consent, themselves violating section 632 of the California penal code in the process. Vera sued both parties over this and the wild misrepresentation of his activities in the edited version of the undercover video, posted online. (Giles settled with Vera and his attorneys this summer.) The episode is a quintessential example of a wholly original term, which we have just coined: journalistic malpractice.