X is refusing to provide a New York court with access to accounts at the center of a legal battle between two women who say they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. One of them is now calling for the court to force the company to comply with her discovery requests, her lawyers wrote in a letter.
The case was filed in 2021 by Rina Oh, a New York City-based artist, against Virginia Giuffre, over claims that Giuffre defamed Oh in a series of tweets, writings, and podcasts. The complaint was updated in January 2022 to include tweets published on Giuffre’s Twitter account from October to December 2021.
In one tweet, Giuffre alleged that Oh was only claiming to be a victim to try to get money from the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, which paid out around $125 million to 150 claimants. Oh applied for the program but declined to say whether she received any money from it in 2022.
Oh also cited a lightly fictionalized unpublished memoir draft Giuffre wrote titled “Billionaires Playboy’s Club.” That draft was unsealed in August 2019 by a New York Court during discovery in a defamation lawsuit Giuffre filed against Ghislaine Maxwell and portrays a woman named "Rena" as an accomplice of Epstein.
Giuffre also wrote several tweets alleging Oh was violent and assaulted her.
For her part, Oh claimed that she “never cut, sexually assaulted or sexually abused” Giuffre and that she was always a victim and not a co-conspirator of “Epstein and his gang.”
Giuffre has been defending herself against the defamation case by maintaining that her tweets are accurate, and arguing that she's entitled to make them along with other statements to protect her reputation.
Many of the tweets that Oh cited came in response to tweets by @MoonProfessor on Twitter. Giuffre’s lawyers claim that that account, along with others including @rinaohamen, @mozieamen, @forkandscissors, @twolittlebakers, and @diningwithoutlaws, belongs to Rita Oh and the Giuffre’s claims were made in response to those accounts in self-defense
Oh told the court that @forkandscissors had become @rinaohartist, and that the @rinaohamen account is the same as the @rinaohartist account. Both accounts are suspended.
She also said that she'd deactivated the @mozieamen account and wasn’t able to log into it when she tried. As for @MoonProfessor, Oh said she didn’t know the account and she wasn’t able to log into it when she attempted to with one of her email addresses. The @MoonProfessor account is also currently suspended for breaking X rules.
Giuffre’s lawyers say that without access to the data and tweets from the @MoonProfessor account their client won't be able to properly defend herself against Oh's defamation claim.
Robert Sack, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, described the right of somebody to defend themselves against defamation as “a recognized interest.”
“An individual is privileged to publish defamatory matter in response to an attack upon his or her reputation; the speaker is given more latitude in such a situation than if the statements were not provoked,” Sack wrote.
Giuffre’s lawyers also wrote in the letter filed on Wednesday that X refused to comply with subpoenas requesting access to the account data, including the most recent request filed on June 10. Because the owner of the accounts is known, X claimed that producing the data would be burdensome.
It argues that Oh can simply sign in and download the data, despite an affidavit from a forensic expert noting that Oh can't access the accounts.
X also claimed that in the case of deleted tweets, it would be unwilling to provide the data because restoring the content would constitute an “undue burden.”’
Because X refused to produce the documents, Giuffre’s lawyers asked the court for a conference ahead of a new motion to compel X to produce them.
“If [Giuffre] is not able to obtain the Twitter comments from [Oh], then she is substantially prejudiced from defending against this lawsuit,” Giuffre’s lawyer wrote.
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