Court Cases

Nigerian President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu was named as the owner of several bank accounts that were used to launder money for a heroin distribution network in Chicago, IL in the early 1990s. The members of the heroin ring were criminally charged in a separate case, Northern District of Illinois Case No. 2:92-cr-00113-RL. For unknown reasons, Tinubu was not. Instead, the U.S. Government seized the contents of the bank accounts based on several different seizure warrants across three different dockets, of which this is one. The other two, from 1992, are in the Southern District of New York and a separate docket in the Northern District of Illinois—both with unknown case numbers since the documents pre-date the federal court's PACER system by so many years. In total, about $2.4 million USD was seized from Tinubu's global bank accounts pursuant to these seizure warrants. While working for Mobil Oil Company in Nigeria, Tinubu used a variety of shell companies to move the money around, including Compass Finance & Investment Co., incorporated in Washington, D.C. Though he was not charged, Tinubu committed at least five federal crimes, according to the IRS Special Agent's affidavit in this case: 1) Money laundering (18 U.S.C. § 1956); 2) Using funds from unlawful activity (18 U.S.C. § 1957); 3) Bank fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1344); 4) Failure to file tax returns (26 U.S.C. § 7203); and 5) Lying to federal agents (18 U.S.C. § 1001). Tinubu was elected to be the next President of Nigeria in February 2023.

This is a general administrative docket used by the New Jersey District Court to post new complaints. It's not actually a real lawsuit.

Based on the fact that a 1993 civil forfeiture lawsuit became one of the most popular dockets on PlainSite, PlainSite founder Aaron Greenspan sued six United States government agencies over their denial of FOIA requests and subsequent administrative appeals about Nigerian President Bold Tinubu, newly elected as of May 2023 in a highly controversial election.

This case was brought before the court because Justin R. Dhooghe found out about an affair between his then fiance Laura V. Rivera and Charles W. Dithrich and wanted information. Charles W. Dithrich wanted to settle out of court for a list of demands including the deletion of all information and pictures Justin R. Dhooghe had in his possession of the affair along with the sum of five thousand dollars in exchange for a non-CLETs restraining order, one that was not on his permanent record. Justin R. Dhooghe eventually refused and the case was brought before the judge and ultimately was dismissed due to insufficient grounds. No restraining order is in effect.

The heart of my case is that Tesla, Inc. illegally terminated me in violation of the FEHA and well-established public policy. More specifically, Tesla illegally fired me for the following reasons: 1) I have a disability (ASD and hypertension that required emergency care). 2) I requested accommodations and unilaterally attempted to engage in a good faith interactive process and was denied. 3) I am an older person. I was almost 62 years old when I was illegally fired. I was replaced immediately (3-days-later) by a software engineer who was approximately half my age. Coworkers made comments about my age and indicated that I was an “old man.” 4) I complained that Rollins and my co-workers were engaging in sexual harassment and offensive communications referring to their penis sizes on Tesla’s communications network. Also, sexual videos of women twerking were placed in the team’s chat that displayed women’s breasts. Reporting was required by Tesla’s own Sexual Harassment and Bullying Training Program. 5) I was forced to open a workers’ compensation case for injuries I sustained as a result of work. I was awarded $45,000 for this claim. 6) Moreover, I was fired because I engaged in whistleblowing regarding sexual harassment, sabotage, and other security issues. Whistleblowing is a protected activity.

Aaron Greenspan, creator of the 2003 predecessor to The Facebook at Harvard University, sued popular author Benjamin Mezrich, his publisher Random House, and Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement, defamation and false advertising due to the statements made by Mezrich in and about his book "The Accidental Billionaires." Mezrich's book, which cites Greenspan's as a source, has been marketed as supposed non-fiction, even though the story is full of inconsistencies and outright falsifications, many of which Mezrich admits to. Mezrich notably omitted Greenspan's role in the creation of the web site, and helped to prop up Mark Zuckerberg as a "genius" in his book, leading to the eventual motion picture "The Social Network," and contributing to the frenzy surrounding Facebook's problematic IPO.

Amanda Patricia Bossingham, also known as "Amy," the proprietor of Amy's Baking Company in Scottsdale, AZ, featured on the popular Fox television show "Kitchen Nightmares," was convicted of bank fraud in 2008 after she falsified a Social Security number on an application for a five-figure bank loan.

Pop star Taylor Swift's early manager Daniel Dymtrow sued the Swift family after his services were terminated just before a meeting with Sony ATV that he alleges he helped to arrange, cutting him out of payments. He also sued Swift's new record label, Big Machine Records, and its founder, Scott Borchetta.

Virginia Giuffre sued Ghislaine Maxwell for defamation after Maxwell alleged that Giuffre's claims about Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring, which ensnared Giuffre as a minor, were not true. Thousands of pages of documents regarding Epstein and his associates, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, have been released in this case as a result of the discovery process.

Current and former servers and bartenders at Darden Restaurants — the parent company of Olive Garden, Red Lobster, LongHorn Steakhouse, Seasons 52, and Bahama Breeze — filed this nationwide collective action in September 2012 in the Southern District of Florida, alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The plaintiffs claimed that Darden illegally required tipped employees to participate in mandatory tip-sharing arrangements and otherwise failed to pay them the federal minimum wage applicable to tipped workers. The proposed class ultimately encompassed more than 216,000 servers and bartenders who worked for Darden brands during the three-year period covered by the claims. The case generated extensive procedural litigation over conditional certification, the scope of the class list, and discovery. In November 2013, the parties discovered that Darden had inadvertently omitted approximately 1,586 bartenders from the class list — those coded under a "Bartender Tip Share" designation introduced at Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Bahama Breeze, and Seasons 52 when those brands rolled out mandatory tip-share programs around 2011. The parties jointly moved to extend the opt-in period to cover these workers. The case proceeded to mediation before a private mediator in June 2014.

Richard Ramirez — the serial killer known as the "Night Stalker" who terrorized Southern California in 1984 and 1985, murdering at least 13 people and assaulting dozens more — filed this federal habeas corpus petition in December 2007 in the Central District of California, challenging his 1989 state court convictions and death sentence. The petition was filed through the Federal Public Defender's office after Ramirez exhausted his state court appeals. Federal habeas proceedings in capital cases are characteristically lengthy, and Ramirez's case proceeded slowly through the district court over several years while he remained on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Ramirez had been convicted of 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries following a highly publicized trial in Los Angeles. The case had been one of the most sensational criminal prosecutions in California history. Ramirez died of natural causes at San Quentin in June 2013 while his federal habeas petition was still pending, rendering the case moot.

Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman over its tight partnership with Microsoft and its for-profit activities.

Twitter, Inc. filed this lawsuit in July 2022 in the Delaware Court of Chancery after Elon Musk attempted to back out of his agreement to acquire the company for approximately $44 billion — $54.20 per share. Musk had signed a merger agreement in April 2022 and then, less than three months later, purported to terminate the deal, citing what he claimed were material misrepresentations by Twitter about the number of spam and bot accounts on its platform. Twitter sought specific performance — a court order compelling Musk to complete the acquisition at the agreed price — rather than money damages. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick agreed to expedite the case to an October 2022 trial date, a timeline Musk vigorously resisted. The litigation moved rapidly through discovery, during which Musk sought extensive information about Twitter's bot-counting methodology and Twitter sought sanctions against Musk for alleged discovery misconduct. A whistleblower complaint from a former Twitter security executive, Peiter Zatko, injected additional complexity into the proceedings by raising questions about Twitter's internal security practices. With trial imminent and the litigation going poorly for Musk, he reversed course in October 2022 and agreed to proceed with the original deal on its original terms. The parties jointly sought a stay of the litigation, and the case was voluntarily dismissed after the acquisition closed. Musk took Twitter private, subsequently rebranding the company and its platform as X. Several related proceedings, including a petition by PlainSite founder Aaron Greenspan seeking public access to sealed court materials, were also part of the docket.

This lawsuit was the second complaint filed by a woman proceeding under the pseudonym Jane Doe against Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the Southern District of New York, filed in September 2016 — four months after the plaintiff had voluntarily dismissed an earlier action in the same court. The refiled complaint contained substantially similar allegations: that the plaintiff, who was 13 years old in 1994, had been raped and sexually abused by both Trump and Epstein at parties hosted by Epstein at his Manhattan townhouse. The complaint alleged that Epstein lured the plaintiff with promises of money and modeling opportunities and that Trump and Epstein subjected her to multiple assaults over the course of several encounters. Like the earlier filing, it included accounts from an alleged witness proceeding as a second anonymous declarant. The refiled case attracted even greater media attention because it was filed shortly before the November 2016 presidential election. A press conference at which the plaintiff and her attorney had planned to speak publicly was canceled, with the attorney citing death threats. The plaintiff again voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit in November 2016, citing fear for her safety. No criminal charges were ever brought based on these specific allegations.

This consolidated stockholder derivative action, filed in September 2016 in the Delaware Court of Chancery, challenged Tesla Motors' $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity Corporation as a conflicted transaction that amounted to a bailout of a struggling company at Tesla shareholders' expense. The central allegation was that Elon Musk, who held a significant stake in both Tesla and SolarCity and whose cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive ran SolarCity, orchestrated the merger to rescue SolarCity from financial distress while using Tesla as the vehicle to do so. Plaintiffs alleged that Musk and the Tesla board members who approved the deal breached their fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders. The litigation proceeded through years of discovery and motion practice before proceeding to a ten-day trial before Vice Chancellor Joseph R. Slights III in July 2021. The trial featured extensive testimony and expert analysis on whether SolarCity was financially distressed at the time of the acquisition, whether the deal price was fair, and whether Tesla's board acted independently given Musk's influence over it. Key witnesses included financial experts debating the valuation of SolarCity and the terms of the transaction. Vice Chancellor Slights issued his post-trial decision in April 2022, ruling that while Musk was a conflicted controlling stockholder, the acquisition was entirely fair to Tesla shareholders and judgment was entered in favor of the defendants. Plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court in May 2022.

Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta filed this derivative lawsuit in June 2018 in the Delaware Court of Chancery challenging the massive compensation package granted to Elon Musk by the Tesla board in January 2018. The plan consisted of 12 tranches of stock options — each representing 1% of Tesla's outstanding shares — that vested upon the achievement of paired market capitalization and operational milestones over a ten-year period. Tesla itself disclosed that the plan's estimated fair value was .6 billion, and analysts projected it could eventually be worth over billion if the company continued to grow. Tornetta alleged that Musk, as Tesla's controlling stockholder and chairman, had improperly influenced the compensation committee and the full board, and that the package was not the product of a fair, arm's-length process. In January 2024, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick issued a landmark decision voiding the compensation package in its entirety. The court found that Musk was a controlling stockholder at the time the plan was approved, that the process by which it was negotiated and approved was deeply flawed and conflicted, and that the defendants had failed to demonstrate that the plan was entirely fair to Tesla shareholders. The decision drew international attention for its size and its implications for corporate governance of founder-controlled companies. Following the ruling, Tesla's board put the compensation package to a shareholder ratification vote in June 2024, which passed with majority support. Proceedings continued in the Court of Chancery through late 2024 as the court considered whether the post-litigation shareholder vote could cure the defects identified in the January 2024 ruling.

Aaron Greenspan, the founder of PlainSite.org, filed this lawsuit pro se in state court in 2024 against Elon Musk, Tesla Inc., X Corp., Jared Birchall (Musk's personal assistant and corporate representative), Omar Qazi (a Tesla promoter who ran the SMICK Enterprises social media account), and several of Musk's attorneys including Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel and Adam Cashman and Allison Huebert of Singer Cashman LLP. The case was removed to the Northern District of California and assigned to Judge Maxine Chesney. Greenspan alleged that Musk and his associates engaged in a coordinated harassment and defamation campaign against him, including directing Qazi to make false statements about Greenspan on social media. Quinn Emanuel represented Tesla, Excession LLC, and Musk's revocable trust. Qazi appeared pro se. The district court ruled against Greenspan, and he filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit in March 2026 from Covina, California. Qazi filed an opposition to Greenspan's motion for extension of time in February 2026.

More than 80 individual plaintiffs — residents and property owners in communities surrounding SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in Cameron County, Texas — filed a class action complaint in the Southern District of Texas (Brownsville Division) on April 30, 2026, against Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX). Judge Rolando Olvera is assigned. The plaintiffs allege that SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy rocket operations at Starbase generate extraordinary acoustic energy — including noise, vibrations, and sonic booms — that has repeatedly and severely damaged their homes and properties. The complaint describes eleven fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy test flights between April 2023 and October 2025, plus six earlier non-full-stack test flights and multiple static engine tests, each generating over 16 million pounds of thrust. Plaintiffs allege their homes, located in the surrounding Cameron County communities, have sustained repeated structural damage from the resulting acoustic events, which they describe as unprecedented in power. The plaintiffs seek jury trial and bring claims for property damage arising from SpaceX's operations. The case was filed on April 30, 2026, with initial procedural orders entered in June 2026.

A San Francisco man unfortunate enough to share the name of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooter was senselessly beaten by the San Francisco Police Department in California shortly after the shooting took place in Colorado. He is suing the San Francisco Police Department. The case received notoriety after an another man was similarly beaten and then put into solitary confinement by the San Francisco police, and linked to Holmes's docket in his blog.

Claudia Gayle filed this class action in November 2007 in the Eastern District of New York against Harry's Nurses Registry, Inc. and its owner Harry Dorvilier, on behalf of herself and other nurses and home health aides who had been placed by the registry. The plaintiffs alleged that Harry's Nurses Registry had systematically violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and New York Labor Law by failing to pay overtime wages, misclassifying workers, and making unlawful deductions from wages earned by workers providing in-home patient care. After years of litigation the court entered judgment in favor of the plaintiffs in September 2012, awarding $619,071.76 in damages to the named plaintiffs and class members. A supplemental judgment was entered in October 2013 following further proceedings before Magistrate Judge Marilyn D. Go, whose Report and Recommendation was adopted in full by Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis. Post-judgment proceedings addressing remaining class members' claims and enforcement continued for years afterward, with the most recent docket activity appearing in September 2024, suggesting ongoing collection or distribution efforts nearly seventeen years after the case was filed.

Stating that he was "out for blood," Elon Musk filed a frivolous lawsuit against PlainSite owner Aaron Greenspan and his company, Think Computer Corporation, which runs PlainSite. Though it was filed in February 2023, it was not served until April. On May 1, Musk dismissed the lawsuit voluntarily. Two days later, Greenspan filed a cross-complaint (known as a counter-suit in other states) against Musk, his attorneys, Tesla, Inc., and Omar Qazi, alleging that Musk and his associates had attempted to use the courts to libel him in a malicious prosecution. Even though Musk and his attorneys were on notice of the lawsuit—they filed it—and corresponded by e-mail about it, they refused to respond to the cross-complaint. The case is ongoing.

Federal prosecutors in the District of Rhode Island charged Irvin Vilneus and four co-defendants — Junior Mertile, Tony Mertile, James Legerme, and Allen Bien-Aime — in a series of related criminal cases filed in late 2020. A notice of related case filed in November 2020 formally linked the five proceedings, indicating the defendants were charged in connection with a common scheme or organization. The cases proceeded together before the court, which is common in prosecutions involving multiple members of an alleged criminal enterprise or conspiracy. The related-case structure suggested the defendants were charged with overlapping or coordinated criminal conduct in Rhode Island.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit in August 2020 in the Southern District of New York against Ripple Labs Inc., its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and co-founder Chris Larsen, alleging that Ripple had conducted an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP tokens to investors over a period of years, raising over $1.3 billion. The SEC argued that XRP was a security under the Howey test because investors purchased XRP with an expectation of profit based on Ripple's managerial efforts. Ripple vigorously contested the classification of XRP as a security, and the case became one of the most closely watched in cryptocurrency law. Judge Analisa Torres issued a landmark summary judgment ruling in July 2023, finding that XRP sold to institutional investors constituted a security but that XRP sold to retail investors on exchanges did not, a split outcome that had significant implications for the broader crypto industry. The case proceeded to trial on the institutional sales claims. Settlement was reached in 2024.

AMA Multimedia, LLC, a Nevada-based producer of adult video content, filed this copyright infringement lawsuit in March 2016 in the Western District of Washington against Spankbang.com and its operator, Nivun PTE Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company. AMA alleged that SpankBang — one of the largest pornographic tube websites — was hosting and distributing AMA's copyrighted video content without authorization, generating advertising revenue from the infringement at AMA's expense. The complaint asserted claims for direct copyright infringement and sought damages and injunctive relief. The case was part of a broader wave of litigation by adult content producers against tube sites that aggregate user-uploaded videos, many of which include professionally produced content uploaded without the rights holders' consent. Establishing jurisdiction over foreign-operated websites and piercing corporate structures to identify liable parties were recurring challenges in such cases. The case settled confidentially.