"Wong also claims knowledge of a large swath of Levandowski’s personal and business dealings. She does so in great detail, including dozens of overheard names, the license-plate numbers of cars she observed at a Levandowski property, and an extensive list of the BDSM gear she claims he kept in his bedroom."
This sounds a lot like she was spying on him for trade secrets. Also, the BDSM gear is completely irrelevant to anything.
The only reason to ever publicise stuff like that is to smear someone. Its low and it undermines any legitimate claim. I'm sure a defense would point out the vexacious nature of those publications.
It might be too late for it at this point. Some of that information is pretty much saying he did some illegal things. A prosecutor could just subpoena her and she has to tell the truth or risk going to jail.
At this point, either all of the allegations she made about him are true or he has a very good defamation lawsuit against her. Whether or not the BDSM claim is true, he has an invasion of privacy claim he can pursue.
Time will tell. Most likely, they'll settle for much less than $6 million.
Generally speaking, when you sue someone, it's often in your best interests to give them an opportunity to settle, instead of going to trial. You often do this by listing all the awful shit about the other person that you're going to air at trial. We don't call that a 'Legal way to blackmail,' and neither is this.
> We don't call that a 'Legal way to blackmail,' and neither is this
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.
Again, how is this different from a threat to sue? Should out-of-court civil settlements be made illegal? All of them are coercive in nature, and a lawsuit almost always results in a lot of dirty laundry being aired. Does this make every settled lawsuit 'legal blackmail'? If so, does the word even have any meaning?
>the BDSM gear is completely irrelevant to anything
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.
> the BDSM gear is completely irrelevant to anything
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.
Well, it's available in the sense that all federal court filings are available at a fee through PACER; it's not linked in the article, nor available anywhere I can readily find other than PACER or pay sites that charge more than PACER for documents plus a monthly fee.
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.
You're saying there's no basis for these claims. The basis is the legal complaint, which is publicly accessible. The whole reason the news media is reporting on this is because they now have access to a public legal filing.
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.
The earth being round and its size is demonstrable without a rocket ship (and was demonstrated a couple millennia before anyone fired a rocket into space.[0])
But, in any case, even ignoring that, the analogy was inapt.
But her claims about his business dealings and his sexual fetishes are both unverified claims, so it's circular reasoning to say one helps prove the other.
Sorry but I have a hard time considering your comment a meaningful contribution to the thread, since it is extremely common for people to #metoo with 20-20 hindsight about other people. The more lurid the details the stronger their conviction.
This Uber-Waymo affair has devolved into absolute tabloid-level nonsense and we should all collectively be ashamed of it.
Levandowski made it clear on more than one occasion of his admiration of some explicitly sociopathic tendencies. More than a few people noticed and talked about it. I'm not sure anyone did anything -- except, perhaps, his nanny apparently.
There's a bigger conversation in there I'd like to have, but I haven't sorted it out in my own mind, and I'm sweating even writing this much.
What exactly are you sharing? It's not illegal to be an asshole. It's also not important to anyone that you knew him years ago and think he's an asshole, so where is the schadenfreude coming from?
What happens when you ignore the hired "help". I'm willing to bet this Levandowski fellow didn't even see her standing in the room.
Obviously, this is a tactic that Wong's lawyers (and her) are using to get Levandowski to settle quickly. If he settles I'd bet there will be a gag clause attached.
There's a lesson here: if you involved in shading dealings, be discreet.
There are so many allegations of wrongdoing that have nothing to do with her main complaint (unpaid wages and mistreatment) that I wonder if this is a tactic to get him to settle quickly, in order to get her to shut up.
I think an issue is that she obviously was listening very closely for a very long time. There are a lot of very detailed conversations with names and specifics that go back awhile. A regular nanny probably wouldn't be listening to phone conversations and committing to memory the names and things said by your employer.
What would the ethical thing to do be? Most people, especially housekeepers, can't just quit a well paying job without first making preparation for their next steps. If your employer is committing crimes and possibly implicating you in them, you might want to stick around to make sure that you have enough evidence to take them to court. Especially if they're a lot richer than you and have much better lawyers.
Wong - My employee isn't paying me correctly. I better start collecting private information about him and his colleagues, without his knowledge, to use in a future lawsuit.
Also keep in mind the data she is collecting has nothing to do with her complaints about wage etc.
So your claim is that if one person is employed by another, they're obligated to always act with their best interests at heart, even if the employer doesn't do the same for the employee?
Levandowski didn't purchase her ears, memory, and voice. Just her labor for some relatively low wage however many hours per week.
I'm sure in the end he'll purchase them, but at a much steeper cost than if he had just paid for them up front.
I think you are obligated to stop a crime that is being committed.
Imagine this is a typical company/employee relationship. Your boss isn't paying you correctly, instead of bringing it up with him (or HR, or state labor group) and resolving it you begin to collect information that is unrelated to your issue at hand (pay). You notice that your boss is selling trade secrets and paying off competitors. Instead of telling someone (at Waymo, Uber, Telsa, the police etc), you continue to collect information about your boss, including his sex toys in his closet and use that information against him to resolve your unrelated HR complaint. This would not go over well in a traditional employee relationship, let alone a nanny type situation.
Maybe nothing is illegal there, but it's definitely unethical. I could be swayed on her tactics if the info she collected was things like "he also doesn't pay his gardener and housekeeper" but the fact that she hung around so that she could get the license plates of people showing up to his door is incredible unethical. It doesn't make what he did right, but she acted in a totally inappropriate manner.
The only information we both have on this is a TechCrunch article. So they've obviously just glanced the most salacious details and published a quick story. It's impossible, without reading the complaint, for us to know what is relevant.
I'll give you that, from the article, his sex toys seem irrelevant. However, if they're mentioned in the complaint, I suspect it might have something to do with a hostile work environment or sexual harassment. But that's just me speculating.
Wouldn't it be blackmail if she didn't go to the courts and tried to demand money in exchange for not reporting him to the court, which she is now doing?
You see crimes being committed and instead of calling the authorities, you continue to collect data (license plate numbers, phone calls, conversations).
It might have only become clear to her at a later point that it's actually criminal rather than just unethical - if she was able to tell from the beginning it is illegal, she would probably be a lawyer or a paralegal, rather than a nanny.
I don't think you copy down the license plates of cars in the driveway just because. In my opinion, she knew exactly what she was doing and what this information could mean to other people. I think this is straight up blackmail.
It's not embarrassing in the sense of showing things that are objectively and rationally bad, but it's embarrassing in the sense of showing things that Google would rather not have public (internal social-media posts by individual employees, with names attached, that almost certainly reflect personal views and not the company's marching orders, and are written with the level of casualness you'd expect from social-media posts in a non-public forum). It seems to me that a good part of the the purpose of including that many screenshots in the lawsuit is to make the relevant individual employees uncomfortable.
read the class action filing. It's incredibly damning to Google.
(Full disclosure, I'm a Xoogler, who left a couple of months before Damore. I am good friends with many of the people categorized as hostile in the filing.)
Wong’s complaint says that on April 27 she overheard Levandowski and his brother Mike talking about how Levandowski might drive up to Alberta, Canada, to avoid prison.
Given this new information, how much more likely does this make that he will be arrested to prevent him fleeing?
IANAL and all that - but a key issue here is that she was in the room when he was talking to his lawyer. If so, it might be harder for Levandowski to assert that the conversation was protected under attorney-client privilege. This could open the door to a much bigger can of worms. I’d expect Levandowski has every incentive to settle with her to keep her quiet. Smart nanny.
> I’d expect Levandowski has every incentive to settle with her to keep her quiet.
It's a little late to do that, keep the info she has already revealed secret, and prevent her from being subpoenaed in the other cases to which it might be relevant.
Uber employee writes a letter making all sorts of damaging claims. He then settles for $4.5M. When made to testify, he "walked back some of the allegations in the letter".
> On March 11, a day after Waymo filed a motion for an injunction against Uber, Wong describes Levandowski texting her to say he was bringing his boss home with him. Half an hour later, she says, Kalanick and Levandowski arrived, bringing with them a white bucket containing circuit boards and lenses, as well as legal documents for Levandowski to sign. She writes that Kalanick spent about five hours at Levandowski’s home.
Amazing. C'mon, she's heard you screaming on the phone to your lawyer. They know your last name. They can google you.
If I was working for this guy, and I observed the stuff that was going on, I would start talking to a lawyer too.
Supposed she did sign a NDA. How is it going to help him. He can sue, but she isn't rich. Plus if stuff he is doing is illegal I am guessing that trumps a NDA.
Something is off here. Why is all of this "dirt" coming out in a nanny employment situation? Plus how in the world did she even know what all these conversations meant and why even remember them all?
I do think Lewandowski is guilty but this seems weird.
Ford has already pointed out that some of her claims are verifiably false, specifically the allegation about Argo.AI, which she claims she overhead, but which didn't have that name at the time of the conversation.
While I don't doubt that Levandowski is capable of some of the things he is alleged to have done, and may have done some of the things alleged, the complaint bears strongly similarities to shakedown lawsuits, especially the statement about the BDSM gear. If she truly had factual support for the allegations she made in the lawsuit (i.e., selling chips overseas, fleeing to Canada to escape charges, etc.), she wouldn't need to include embarrassing details like the BDSM stuff. That's the kind of detail you only include to try to force a settlement before discovery/trial.
Given that it's a she said/he said over the phone, it's a trivial matter to match up phone records to prove whether these alleged calls took place. The third parties named in the lawsuit can be subpoenaed (but as non-parties can likely charge the plaintiff and/or defendants for their costs incurred in responding).
Is this the first time the names of engineers working at other companies and presumably being paid by Anthony to leak information have been disclosed? This seems pretty heavy.
If even half of what this complaint claims is true, Levandowski is going to prison for a long time--or should, if our justice system is worth anything.
I wonder if Waymo will find any of this of use in their lawsuit against Uber. Ditto the government prosecutor who is already investigating Levandowski over the charge that he stole information from Waymo.
In blackmail, you keep the damaging information secret while you try to get the target to pay. Publicizing it doesn't work, because the whole point is for the target to pay to keep it secret.
So, unless there is something worse that Levandowski would know she knows that would come out if the allegations in the lawsuit were litigated, this is not likely to be “blackmail as lawsuit”.
Best post here and clears it up for me. I just could not figure this out as made no sense. Once out there there is no black mail possible. But if you put some out there to show you are serious it is very effective.
What is unbelievable is how bad this is suggests the rest is off the charts. Well I view this off the charts so the rest thermonuclear.
This is what I thought, too. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Maybe the nanny is including some damaging information in the lawsuit, but not the most damaging information. She puts in plenty of details to send the message that she has a lot of specific details regarding the real dirt.
This sounds a lot like she was spying on him for trade secrets. Also, the BDSM gear is completely irrelevant to anything.