Parler, the pro-Donald Trump social media site that has served as a sort of free brainworm buffet in recent years, is being sued by its own co-founder and former CEO.
After the January 6 Capitol riots, which were partially organized on the spot with Parler’s violent death threats, Amazon Web Services initialized Parler from its servers and Apple and Google launched their respective app stores. The site is now back, although it has failed to convince any of the other companies to let it return, but CEO John Matze has not returned for the second leg of the trip. He was forced to go out in some kind of internal dispute with Republican Party mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a large investor who is now allegedly playing personally the website, and former extreme right-wing analyst at NRATV and fellow investor Dan Bongino, whose role seems to consist, at least partially, in inciting his millions of Facebook followers to migrate to a website in which he has a personal financial stake.
The match didn’t go well, with Bongino accusing Matze trying to sell the original mission of the site as a free speech utopia where almost everything is legal – exactly what got the company in trouble first – and Matze telling the media Mercer turned a blind eye to do anything about the flood of QAnon conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, fascists, racists and other nasty fanatics who took over the site. Now Matze is claiming that his 40 percent stake in the company was stolen in “a strange and arrogant theft … summed up by oppression, fraud and malice”, by the Las Vegas Sun.
Matze wrote in court cases alleging breach of contract and defamation that Parler was “kidnapped to promote the defendants’ personal political interests and personal advantages, rather than serving as a platform for freedom of expression as originally conceived”. Mercer and Bongino are named as defendants in the lawsuit, alongside COO Jeffrey Wernick and Parler’s new interim CEO, Tea Party activist Mark Meckler.
Matze wrote in the process that the company was initially founded using a holding company designed to overshadow Mercer’s involvement and fought over finance (in his narrative, Mercer characterized his 60 percent stake in the capital as a loan that would need to be repaid). He added that Mercer seemed to lose interest in the site until about November 2020 – it is unclear exactly when, but that must have been sometime around when Parler inscriptions were emerging amid Trump’s allegations, the election was stolen – and she subsequently refused to give in to more stringent moderation proposals after the unrest. By NPR:
“Matze’s proposal was met with deadly silence, which he considered a rejection of his proposal,” according to the suit.
Matze says in the lawsuit that Mercer brought in allies, including Wernick, to “force him out of the company”.
Wernick reportedly threatened Matze with an “avalanche of lawsuits and expenses if he dared to challenge Mercer,” the suit said.
Wernick, according to the lawsuit, told Matze not to consult his own lawyer and threatened that “he would be ruined” if he did.
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Matze pretends to be a kind of innocent-minded idiot. Court documents state that, upon meeting his eventual replacement, Meckler, “it became apparent to Matze that Meckler’s efforts were not to grow Parler as a platform for free expression, but instead to redirect it to what Meckler called a ‘conservative spearhead’ for a kind of conservatism in line with Mercer’s preferences. ”Considering Parler obvious ideological pandering, who allegedly tried to entice Trump to register an account with shareholding pledges in the summer of 2020, and that Matze boasted banning liberal trolls throughout the site, it is difficult to take seriously the claim that Matze had no idea that his site would be used to promote the right-wing agenda.
Finally, Matze claims in the lawsuit that the Parler administration defamed him with suggestions of misconduct and violations of his obligations as a manager, when in reality the site continued to go online using the technical game plan he developed, only very badly. (As Meckler “didn’t have the technical knowledge to actually run this social media platform – and his real role was simply to promote a political agenda – implementation was beyond lack,” added Matze.) He also writes that as part of the downed, Mercer’s people determined that the “fair market value” of their 40 percent stake was a measly three dollars.
Maybe in this, we can agree: Parler is worth about $ 7.50, plus or minus a few dollars, depending on whether it helps to successfully provoke another failed uprising.
Matze, however, says his share in the Internet hell is worth millions and that, in internal discussions, he and Mercer have valued the site at $ 1 billion or more.
The former CEO “expects to present his claims in court and be justified,” Matze’s lawyer, James Pisanelli, told Sun in a statement.