It sounds like the third-act reveal of some non-descript legal drama, but attorneys for Facebook are claiming that they have “smoking gun documents” in the ongoing legal battle with Paul Ceglia—the man who claims that he actually owns half of the social networking giant—but that they aren’t allowed to say what they are, by court order.
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The secrecy comes from the fact that Ceglia’s lawyers have heavily redacted the motion that Facebook’s law team filed last week, and the judge is still mulling whether or not to release an unredacted version to the public.
What we can see suggests that there’s something very interesting in the (redacted, of course) documents Ceglia has provided to the court already.
From the motion:
“[Ceglia] does not want the public to know what was discovered on his computers because it includes smoking-gun documents that conclusively establish that he fabricated the purported contract and that this entire lawsuit is a fraud and a lie… Rather than produce the [REDACTED] as required by the Order, Ceglia took a wait-and-see approach by making available a collection of computers, floppy disks and thousands of CDs without identifying any of the files or documents stored on them — either not realizing that the [REDACTED] remained embedded in one of the computers, or simply hoping that Defendants would not find it.”
Short of “redacted” turning out to be “signed admission that he’s making the whole thing up, neener neener neener,” it’s unclear just what the smoking gun discovered inside the document actually is, so all we can do is hope that the unredacted version is released soon… or that Ceglia follows through on the John Grishamness of what’s going on, and gives some maniacal monologue in which he explains everything for the benefit of those of us who fell asleep midway through the movie.
[via paidContent.org]
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Graeme McMillan is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @Graemem or on Facebook at Facebook/Graeme.McMillan. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.