A California federal lawsuit brought by adult entertainers alleges that three Meta executives bribed and abused internet databases to flag terrorist content.
In a court filing Tuesday, Meta's vice president of global affairs and vice president of Meta's global business team were identified as the former "John Does" in a suit accusing them of taking bribes.
Meta employees were accused of working under the table to help OnlyFans by getting its competitors black listed on the internet. The suit was filed in a San Francisco federal court by a group of adult online entertainers who have alleged Meta employees added their accounts and others linked to OnlyFans competitors to databases used by companies internationally to identify malicious software and terrorist accounts.
An attorney for entertainers introduced copies of wire transfers last week. The claims that three Meta executives took payments from an Only Fans middleman that shared a physical address with an affiliated corporate entity were supported by the alleged transfers.
A third employee was identified in the filing. A Meta employee with the same name is working as a trust and safety director for Facebook.
Meta denied the claims after being asked about them. In court, the company's lawyers are more focused on whether or not the allegations are true than on whether or not the company is liable. The allegations are referred to asmeritless, a legal term of art that refers to allegations that aren't actionable.
We deny the allegations as they lack facts, merit or anything that would make them plausible. The allegations are not true.
Lawyers for the parent company of OnlyFans said in a filing on Wednesday that they accidentally revealed the identity of Meta's executives. It asked the court to remove the document because the names of the employees were inadvertently un redacted. Meta referred to the executives as the "John Does" in its own motion.
The lawsuit was filed against Meta and its subsidiaries, as well as the owner of OnlyFans, who had a financial history that was thoroughly investigated by forensic accountants.
According to the lawsuit, another company, Fenix International, served as a middleman for the bribes.
The wire transfer documents show funds going to two trust accounts in the Philippines. The documents state that a third account was opened in the name of a high-ranking Facebook executive.
The claims are false, says Meta's vice president of public affairs. Attempts to get in touch with Perrella and Mendelsohn were not successful.
Meta argued in a motion on Tuesday that the amended complaint did not meet the requirements for standing under the recent US Supreme Court decisions.
Dan Novack is a media and First Amendment attorney and associate general counsel at Penguin Random House. It requires judges to use some level of reasoning to decide if the thing is realistic.
According to Novack, it is not as hard to get a case into federal court as it used to be. The benefit of going through discovery and subpoenas and getting depositions is lost when a person comes into court. Sometimes the point of the lawsuit is to gather information about the case and be able to move forward, so if they had to have a smoking gun it would put them in a tough spot. Even if it's circumstantial, they have to have something to back up their allegations.
The motion to dismiss focused on whether the company could be held responsible if the allegations turned out to be true. The allegations are inconsistent with any argument that the employees acted with authority.
A 1995 case was cited by Meta attorneys to demonstrate precedent. The California Supreme Court ruled that the hospital was not liable for the assault because it had only served the employee's interests and not theirs.
The John Does went rogue by manipulating and corrupting automated processes and databases that Meta had established for purposes of terrorism, deployment of those methods to attack competitors of an adult-entertainment company, and then attempting to cover their tracks, according to the lawsuit.
Meta believes that the company's First Amendment rights and the limited liability protections offered by the Communications Decency Act would have protected OnlyFans' competitors.
The story is evolving.
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