After playing stout defense against process servers for months, Shaquille O’Neal was finally served.
Adam Moskowitz’s law firm finally delivered papers for its class action lawsuit against bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX on Sunday. O’Neal was the only holdout among the various defendants, which included other celebrity endorsers of FTX, like Steph Curry and Tom Brady.
The plaintiffs repeatedly failed to serve Shaq at any of his homes or his workplaces. Last week, a judge ruled that attorneys couldn’t complete service by messaging O’Neal on Twitter or Instagram, so the attorneys made a last-ditch effort to find O’Neal before the April 17 deadline. Reportedly, they waited outside TNT’s studios for hours and finally took to social media to demand O’Neal accept service.
Moskowitz has been very Shaq-focused on Twitter. Ten of the account’s 14 tweets in 2023 have been directed at O’Neal and his avoidance of process servers. The attorneys couldn’t get into TNT’s studios, or his homes, even after Shaq’s hip replacement surgery.
Luckily, O’Neal got some insurance against his legal liability when Charles Barkley offered to give him “a billion dollars” if the Atlanta Hawks beat the Miami Heat — which they did.
O’Neal hasn’t commented, except to tell CNBC he was “just a paid spokesman” for a commercial and not part of what plaintiffs’ attorneys called a “massive Ponzi scheme.” But the Moskowitz firm managed to do what the Indiana Pacers, Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets couldn’t do in the NBA Finals: Stop Shaq.
Where do Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers rank among our greatest teams of the 2000s? Find out here.
