Parler, the pro-Donald Trump social networking site that has served as a buffet you can eat for brainworms in recent years, is being sued by its own co-founder and former CEO.
Following the January 6 riots at the Capitol, which was partly organized on the site laden with threats of Parler’s violent death, Amazon Web Services started Parler on its servers and Apple and Google they started their respective app stores. The site is back now, although it failed to persuade any of those companies to let it return, but CEO John Matze has not returned for the second leg of the trip. He was forced to go into some sort of internal dispute with GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a major investor who now appears to be personal banking the site and former far-right NRATV expert and fellow investor Dan Bongino, whose role seems at least in part to be to urge his millions of Facebook followers to migrate to a site in which he has a personal financial stake.
The departure did not go well with Bongino accusing Matze to try to sell the original mission of the site as a utopia of free expression in which almost anything legal goes – exactly what it has achieved company in difficulty First of all – and Matze telling the media Mercer had closed his eyes to any flood of the flood of QAnon conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, fascists, racists, and other unpleasant zealots taking over. Now, Matze claims that his 40% share of the company was stolen in an “extraordinary and arrogant theft … symbolized by oppression, fraud and malice.” on the Las Vegas Sun..
Matzo wrote in court files alleging breach of contract and defamation that Parler was “misappropriated to promote the personal political interests and personal advantages of the defendants, rather than to serve as a platform for free expression as originally intended”. Both Mercer and Bongino are named defendants in the trial, along with Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Wernick and Parler’s new interim CEO, Tea Party activist Mark Meckler.
Matze wrote in his suit that the company was originally founded using a holding company designed to hide Mercer’s involvement and argued financially (according to him, Mercer characterized its 60% share as a loan that should be repaid). He added that Mercer seemed to lose interest in the site by around November 2020 – it is not clear exactly when, but this would have been once when The registrations speak they were growing amid Trump’s claims, the election was stolen and he later refused to compromise on the proposals for stricter restraint following the riots. On NPR:
“Matze’s proposal was met with a dead silence, which he considered a rejection of his proposal,” according to the lawsuit.
Matze says in the trial that Mercer brought allies, including Wernick, to “arm him strongly in the company.”
Wernick allegedly threatened Matze with an “avalanche of claims and legal costs if he dared to defy Mercer,” the lawsuit said.
Wernick, according to the lawsuit, told Matze not to consult his own lawyer and threatened that he would be “destroyed” if he did so.
G / O Media may receive a commission
Matze is played to be kind of innocent in the suit. Court documents state that at the meeting with his eventual replacement, Meckler, “it became apparent to Matze that Meckler’s efforts were not to raise Parler as a platform for free speech, but to redirect him to what Meckler called” the tip conservative spear ”. for a brand of conservatism in line with Mercer’s preferences. “Given Parler’s record ideological pandering, that he would try to entice Trump to register an account at promises of a capital action in the summer of 2020 and which Matze boasted about banning liberal “trolls” throughout the site, it’s hard to take the statement that Matze had no idea that his site would be used to seriously advance the right agenda.
Finally, Matze claims in the lawsuit that Parler’s management clogged him with suggestions of misconduct and breaches of his obligations as a manager, when, in reality, the site continues to return online using the technical game plan he developed, just very stupid. (Because Meckler “lacked the technical knowledge to actually run such a social networking platform – and his real role was to simply push a political agenda – implementation was beyond short,” Matze added. ) He also writes that, as part of the exemption, Mercer’s people determined that the “fair market value” of his 40% share was stupid. three dollars.
Maybe on this, we can agree: Parler is worth about $ 7.50, give or take a few dollars depending on whether it helps to successfully provoke another failed insurrection.
However, Matze says that his stake in the Hellhole Internet is actually worth millions and that, in internal discussions, he and Mercer valued the site at $ 1 billion or more.
The former CEO “is looking forward to his claims in court and being claimed,” Matze’s lawyer James Pisanelli told Sun in a statement.