Government

Fired Parler CEO Sues Dan Bongino and Rebekah Mercer In Batsh*t Tort Claim

With cameos by JD Vance and Greenberg Traurig.

By  
on

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. At least that’s what Rebekah Mercer hoped, according to a defamation lawsuit filed Monday in Nevada by her former business partner John Matze, who alleges that the billionaire Republican activist attempted to conceal her role in their new radical free speech startup fearing that it “would serve as a distraction and would be potentially toxic to Parler’s business objectives.”

So Mercer got her lawyers at Greenberg Traurig to spiffy up an Operating Agreement where 60 percent of Parler LLC would be owned by a mysterious Delaware company called NDMascendant, LLC, with Matze owning the other 40 percent. NDM, AKA Mercer, appointed two “managers,” one of whom was JD Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy Ohio senate candidate.

Then things got messy. And not just because the site was a nexus for planning the Capitol Riot, since users knew they were unlikely to get kicked off for posting about their plans to “Shoot the police that protect these shitbag senators right in the head then make the senator grovel a bit before capping they ass.”

Parler experienced rapid growth in 2020 as mainstream platforms began to aggressively (at least relatively speaking) censor misinformation about coronavirus and the election. Parler’s management knew they’d have to scale up the operation and bring in new investors if they wanted to present a real alternative to Twitter.

Vance appears to have departed the scene relatively quickly, but self-described anarcho-capitalist angel investor Jeffrey Wernick and conservative media star Dan Bongino were active in steering the company, going so far as to fly to Mar-a-Lago to negotiate with the sitting president to give him an ownership stake in exchange for making the site his digital home.

(Remember Trump screaming about Barack Obama’s deal with Netflix?)

But Matze says that Mercer refused to do anything to dilute her own shares or surrender ultimate control of a platform she intended to turn into the “tip of the conservative spear” to advance her personal ideology. For instance, Dan Bongino claims that he took a massive hit when Amazon knocked Parler offline for violating its terms of service. But according to Matze, Bongino never had a financial stake in the company at all because “Mercer avoided executing any of the ownership documents to allow her to later dispute that Bongino has any such interest.”

Sponsored

He further accuses Mercer of playing fast and loose with the company’s valuation.

Mercer proposed allowing a friend to invest in Parler at a $200 million valuation, a level that she conceded was heavily discounted as an accommodation to her friend and to better protect her interest from future dilution. But, outside of this self-interested suggestion, Mercer stated that she was not interested in any transaction with a valuation of less than $500 million. She and Matze continually discussed that the enterprise should have a valuation of at least one billion dollars. In fact, Parler recently reiterated the one-billion-dollar valuation in ongoing litigation.

Matze also alleges that Mercer double-counted her share in the company, claiming her initial investment was a personal loan that must be repaid: “In short, the very same dollars that were the supposed 60% equity stake were also being claimed as debt.”

Things came to a head after Parler was deplatformed in January. In Matze’s telling, he proposed a moderation scheme that would kick Qanon cultists and Neo-Nazis off the site, after which he was fired and his ownership stake was “stolen” by Mercer and her allies.

Now, having fabricated false claims of “misconduct,” the conspirators then claimed that the Parler Operating Agreement allowed the forced sale and purchase of Matze’s 40% ownership stake. Demonstrating the depravity of their arrogance and tactics, Mercer, through Meckler and Richardson, claimed that they had determined that the “fair market value” of Matze’s 40% interest to be a mere $3.00. Thus, Defendants took Matze’s property and smeared his name and asserted that his sole entitlement is to $3.00. That is the true nature of these Defendants.

Sponsored

Yes, the allegations of “depravity” and “arrogance” are a little overheated. And no corporate documents, including that Operating Agreement, were attached to the 19-page complaint — at least not the versions the Las Vegas Sun and NPR were able to dig up. But this isn’t a garbage fire like Bongino’s defamation suit against The Daily Beast either. And Matze didn’t hire a guy who flies around the country filing pro hac vice motions to get his ass kicked in a fun, new venue, either. With prominent Nevada lawyers James Pisanelli and Todd Bice representing him, Matze’s team is playing on their own home court.

This one is going to be wild.

Matze v. Parler, LLC [Complaint via NPR]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

, , , ,