In a recent court submission, legal representatives for basketball icon Shaquille O’Neal, commonly referred to as Shaq, claim he was not duly served in the FTX class-action lawsuit. As per the document, servers allegedly hurled the court documents at Shaq’s car, ultimately landing on the public street near his Georgia residence.
Shaq’s Legal Team Fights Back Against FTX Lawsuit
In Monday’s legal filing, Shaq’s lawyers contested the proper service claims, following the Moskowitz Law Firm’s disclosure that they had served O’Neal and that the service was captured on his home security system. “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,” Moskowitz stated in a tweet.
Nonetheless, attorneys for Shaq contend that the purported delivery at his Georgia property was not legally valid. They argue that process servers gathered outside Shaq’s residence without identifying themselves and state that court documents were thrown at the NBA star’s vehicle before falling onto the public road as he departed. His lawyers add that the process servers simply left the paperwork on the street.
Moskowitz alleges that O’Neal evaded process servers for months while other celebrities accepted their complaints. The latest court document also claims Moskowitz’s servers missed the deadline to serve O’Neal. O’Neal’s attorneys argue that plaintiffs had numerous attempts to serve him properly, stating, “Mr. O’Neal has not evaded service by failing to be at the residences where plaintiffs belatedly attempted service or by driving past strangers who approached his car.”
The charges against O’Neal involve his promotion of FTX and implicate its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried as a co-defendant. Furthermore, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Stephen Curry, Udonis Haslem, David Ortiz, William Trevor Lawrence, Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, Lawrence Gene David, Kevin O’Leary, and the NBA team the Golden State Warriors are also named as defendants in the Miami-based Garrison v. Bankman-Fried, 22-cv-23753 case.
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