This sounds a lot like she was spying on him for trade secrets. Also, the BDSM gear is completely irrelevant to anything.
He has too much at stake for her to take the stand and be questioned.
I mean, if we're just going by Wikipedia, my non-lawyerly brain would parse this:
> It is coercion involving threats to reveal substantially true [...] information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates, or threats of [...] criminal prosecution.
as being precisely what's happening here. Breadcrumbs were thrown out in public with an implication to settle in order to avoid more getting out.
That sounds like "legal blackmail" to most laypeople.
Time will tell. Most likely, they'll settle for much less than $6 million.
Only if we presume that HN's fascination with Waymo vs Uber and the man at the centre of it all serves as something other than a tech world surrogate for lurid celebrity gossip.
Sums up the level of horseplay when they examined the power relationships involving contractual bondages offered by a competing corporate interest through the submission to a liquid asset.
Without access to the actual complaint, there's little basis for the first sentence and none for the second.
If you’d like to provide a link, that would actually contribute a lot to the discussion. Suggesting that it's out there somewhere does not.
Without being a news reporter myself, I must rely on what is reported to me. While I know that the news media will give it their own biased slant, certain things, like her saying that she has the license plate numbers of those visiting his house, or that he has BDSM gear, I believe I can take as objectively factual.
Would you also say that without access to a rocket ship or the personal ability to do advanced astrological calculations that there is no basis to the statement that the earth is round?
I'm saying that there is no basis that has been cited for the specific characterizations made in the comment I first responded to upthread, correct.
> The basis is the legal complaint, which is publicly accessible.
Your post in which you made the characterization quoted text from the news article, not the complaint. If you actually have read the complaint and were characterizing the material in it after reading it in context, that was a very poor presentation.
> While I know that the news media will give it their own biased slant, certain things, like her saying that she has the license plate numbers of those visiting his house, or that he has BDSM gear, I believe I can take as objectively factual.
Perhaps, but the characterization of their relevance to the legal causes of action at the center of the case would require knowing, for instance, the details of the alleged manner of intentional infliction of emotional distress and whether or not the arsenal of BDSM equipment was integral to that. Which you could not get from the news article at the head of the thread; you could, presumably, from the complaint, but I see no evidence that you have seen it.
But, in any case, even ignoring that, the analogy was inapt.