For months, lawyers have been searching for Shaquille O’Neal. A judge ruled they can’t just DM him.
Attorneys asked Judge K. Michael Moore last week for permission to serve O’Neal with legal papers via his social media accounts, for a class-action suit against celebrity endorsers of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Judge Moore rejected their motion like Shaq meeting a Rex Chapman shot in the lane.
While the plaintiff’s attorneys claimed to have reached out to O’Neal via his Twitter and Instagram accounts, as well as O’Neal’s attorneys’ emails, Judge Moore called those attempts “factually unsupported and legally insufficient.”
Moore’s ruling continued, “Particularly in such a complex and costly litigation for all parties involved, the Court will not continue to tolerate such violations or frivolous arguments.”
FTX investor Edwin Garrison is suing on the grounds that celebrities like O’Neal, Tom Brady, Steph Curry and more engaged in “deceptive practices” when they appeared in ads for FTX. Garrison’s attorneys already received an extension from an earlier December deadline to serve O’Neal. Now they only have until April 17 to either deliver the legal papers to O’Neal, or drop him from the lawsuit.
It’s almost impossible to believe that these attorneys can’t locate the enormous O’Neal, who appears on television at least twice a week and was even sidelined with hip surgery. O’Neal has never been considered elusive, though in his Phoenix Suns days he claimed to have the speed of Olympic sprinter “Osain Bolton.”
And he’s often showed off how good he is at hiding.
Let’s hope he doesn’t get hit with a class action lawsuit for promoting unhealthy doughnuts after that one.
Time is running out on the process servers, and the judge seems to have lost his patience. Without a last-minute miracle, O’Neal is going to avoid being a defendant. And we all know Shaq is usually on the winning side of a buzzer-beater.
