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Previously sealed court documents leaked to gossip site Radar Online reveal that this spring, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who became famous through their portrayal in the film “The Social Network,” made good on their longstanding vow to sue Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg yet again, reports CNET.
The partially redacted documents, which first surfaced Tuesday, are dated Aug. 10 and come in the form of a brief filed by Facebook’s legal team in response to the ConnectU claims. The twin Harvard graduates, who have for years alleged that Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook after they had hired him to code a social-networking site called Harvard Connection (later ConnectU) for them in late 2003, now allege security fraud against Zuckerberg and Facebook. They claim that Facebook was not open about its actual valuation at the time of the original ConnectU vs. Facebook lawsuit’s settlement in 2008, and that as a result the ConnectU plaintiffs say they’re actually entitled to more than the $65 million in cash and Facebook stock that they were awarded.
ConnectU’s dissatisfaction with the multimillion-dollar settlement it received from Facebook has been public for nearly three years now, dating back to the revelation that Facebook valued itself at around $3.7 billion at the time of the settlement and the Winklevoss’ subsequent claim that they were misled into thinking it was more than that.
“They acknowledge that Facebook never made any representation as to the value of its shares. Rather, they admit that they calculated the value themselves, based upon a truthful press release from several months earlier. Their fraud claim is based on omission: They fault Facebook for not volunteering a more recent — and, they claim, lower — valuation of different Facebook stock,” the court document filed by Facebook in August reads. “They insist that their sworn enemy had some special duty to open its books and volunteer any information that bears on the value of this closely held company.”
The surfacing of the document this week makes the whole thing even more high-profile, given that Zuckerberg and both Winklevoss twins all appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment about Facebook on Sunday night, one in which one of the twins angrily claimed that Zuckerberg “premeditatively sandbagged us because he knew getting there first was everything,” and in which Zuckerberg said he has “probably spent less than two weeks of my time worried about this lawsuit at all.”