Shaquille O’Neal Asks Court to Dismiss FTX Lawsuit, Claims Court Papers Were Tossed at His Moving Car
On Monday, May 8, 2023, the legal team of former Los Angeles Lakers star Shaquille O’Neal filed a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that accused the NBA star and other celebrities of duping investors into investing in the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
FTX is a multibillion-dollar Texas-based crypto exchange that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2022. The following month, FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested and charged with defrauding clients of their money and using it to merge with neighboring firm, Alameda Research, for his own personal gain.
O’Neal was one of many high-profile figures who endorsed FTX. The former Lakers star appeared in an advert where he claimed to be all in with the exchange. Following the exchange’s collapse, Shaq distanced himself from the bankrupt crypto exchange, stating that “he doesn’t believe in crypto” and that he “was just a paid spokesperson for a commercial.”
In November 2022, a class action lawsuit was filed in Florida by the Moskowitz law firm on behalf of FTX retail investor Edwin Garrison. The lawsuit alleged that Shaq and other celebrities utilized their “persuasion” to get individuals to invest in FTX.
According to the law firm, they made numerous attempts to serve Shaq the complaint at various known addresses in Georgia, Texas, and other locations, but the NBA star refused to acknowledge receipt of the document.
On April 17, 2023, the law firm reported that Shaq had been served outside his house.
“His home video cameras recorded our service and we made it very clear that he is not to destroy or erase any of these security tapes, because they must be preserved for our lawsuit,” the law firm said.
O’Neal’s lawyers claimed in a filing on Monday that the plaintiff’s missed their deadline and that a legal document “tossed” at the front of O’Neal’s car while he was driving out of his Atlanta residence does not count as the proper way of serving a lawsuit.
“As Mr. O’Neal — who never exited his car — drove past the strangers lurking outside his home, one of the process servers ‘tossed the legal documents at the front of’ his car,” O’Neal’s lawyers said. “When the documents hit the car, which was moving ‘at a high rate of speed,’ the documents ‘f[e]ll onto the road,’ and the process servers ‘l[e]ft the legal documents on the road where they landed’ — that is, on the public road…. Throwing papers at a moving car and leaving them unattended on a public highway “is not good tender as it provides no way of knowing whether the papers landed in physical proximity to” Mr. O’Neal.”
O’Neal’s lawyers said that the process of serving the complaint is “inadequate under Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Georgia law” and requested the court that the lawsuit “should be quashed, and the claims against Mr. O’Neal dismissed.”
A copy of the original filing can be found here.
