This is Bloomberg Law with June Grossel from Bloomberg Radio.
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court divided down ideological lines upheld Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care for transgender miners,
a stunning setback to transgender rights. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the six Conservatives, finding the law doesn't violate the Constitution's equal Protection clause, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same Roberts wrote that there are fierce scientific and policy debates about the medical treatments, and that quote, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the
democratic process, echoing what the Chief had said during the oral arguments.
You know, we might think that we're, you know, we can do just as good a job with respect to the the evidence here as Tennessee or anybody else. But my understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is the doctor.
Justice Sonya Sotomayoa wrote a blistering descent for the court's three liberals, accusing the Conservatives of abandoning transgender children and their families to political whims. During the oral argument, she'd pointed out that the democratic process does not protect transgender people against bad laws.
When you're one percent of the population or less, very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you, Well, are you. Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn't protect them. It didn't protect women for whole centuries.
The decision will affect transgender kids in half the states which have laws similar to the in Tennessee. Joining me is Kate Redburn, a professor at Columbia Law School whose expertise centers on the law of gender, sexuality, and religion. How much of a setback is this decision for transgender rights.
It's a significant setback for transgender rights, especially regarding the availability and access to medically necessary treatments for gender dysphoria. So the opinion refers to SB one's Tennessee law, which essentially prohibits transgender youth from accessing gender from maing care while allowing all other youth to access the same treatments.
He says, that's not a sex classification. What it doesn't do, however, is it doesn't hold that trans people are not a suspect class in general, So it looks like at least three justices were willing to go that far, and the opinion didn't go that far, So it doesn't necessarily reach
as far as all transcrimination. And even though I think the Court clearly reached the wrong conclusion about whether or not SB one is a sex classic, it seems to have left open the possibility that it or other courts could be presented with evidence that laws like SB one
are really fueled by anti trans sentiment. And so because that path remains open, I feel like this decision, while absolutely devastating for trans kids and their families and potentially for trans adults seeking care that is regulated, it is not the total destruction of equal protection law that it could have been, and that it appears at least three justices were willing to do.
The three justices you're referring to being Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Cony Barrett explain the central legal question here regarding the equal protection clause.
So the question before the court was whether or not this law violated equal protection, and the United States under the prior administration really directed the court's attention to the question of whether or not this law constituted a sex classification. So does the law turn on sex? And the reason for that is because when laws do turn on sex, the court looks more closely at the law. They call
that heightened scrutiny for sex discrimination. So the Court has said that certain kinds of classifications, race classifications paradigmatically.
More into strict scrutiny.
So the Court's going to look very hard. Sex classifications, the Court has previously said sometimes are permissible, it's sometimes okay for governments to distinguish between people on the basis of sex or make sex classifications, but because it sounds a little bit potentially suspicious, they're going to look more closely. And so the question here was is a sex classification?
And then the danger was what had happened in the Sixth Circuit where in this case that court had said that this law was not a sex classification and sort of combined the analysis in a way that made people concern that the Court was going to find that even certain kinds of sex classifications don't warrant heightened scrutiny. So here what happened was the Robert's majority opinion says that this law is not a sex classification and therefore only warrant's rational basis review.
Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinions talked about the fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. Quote, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process. Is that just the court looking for an out? I mean, they do make policy decisions.
Yeah, So it sounds not dissimilar to what the Court said about Dobbs when it overturned roversus Wade, which was under the guise of changing doctrine, and that case quite significantly, you described itself as kicking the question back to the states.
What is suspicious about that language in this context is that the heightened scrutiny is actually designed to make it possible for course to spend some time really looking at the justifications that the governments are using for regulating and classifying on sex, and then it also asks whether or not the means justify the ed. So it might be that there's a close relationship between the purpose of the law and its classification, but it's nevertheless not an acceptable
purpose anyway. All that's to say that the existing doctrine is meant to give the court the opportunity to really weigh evidence. And what this decision does is it seems to open up the possibility of authorizing governments to regulate around medical procedures that touch on sex without courts even looking.
To weigh the evidence. So it might be the.
Case that the Court would have applied heightened scrutiny and still found that this particular law had on its view of sufficient evidentiary support, you know, in light of the purported medical controversy. But it might not have, and it really denied itself and potentially future courts from even looking into that.
Justice Soto Mayor eroded descent for the three liberals. She read a summary of it from the bench, which the justices sometimes do when they feel strongly about a descent. Then she ended with in sadness I dissent. She talked about the majority abandoning transgender children and their families to political whims.
I think that you know, her sadness stems from the fact that this is going to for were potentially trans kids and their families in half of the states where similar laws are on the books to relocate in order to simply live their lives.
The state of the.
Medical controversy about these issues, and the majority opinion is vastly overstated. Much of the history that it relies on, and some of the other concurring opinians rely on, it's just untrue. And so you know what I think Justice Sodomyor was trying to say is that the consequences for trans youth in particular are just really, really egregious.
In her courtroom statement, she said that similar arguments were made to defend the Virginia law that prohibited interracial marriage that the Supreme Court struck down in nineteen sixty seven.
Yeah, so we call those equal application laws. So in Loving versus Virginia, the argument was well for the law prohibited interracial marriage, and the justification for it that the state gave was this is not racial discrimination because white people are not allowed to marry people of color and people of color are not allowed to marry white people.
In other words, everyone is equally prohibited. The said, No, it is still rooted in racial stereotypes that suggest that interracial marriage is bad and also animus towards racial minorities and trying to reinforce the racial hierarchy in the country. So the fact that you can find in that case white people and black people on both sides of the line that the regulation draws does not mean that it's
not subject to heightened scrutiny. So there's a reading of the majority's opinion here that does exactly the same thing. And that's what she's saying that just because there are transgender miners on both sides of the line. In other words, transgender miners, according to the court, can still obtain sort of treatments if they're not for the purposes of addressing
gender dysphoria. That doesn't mean that this is not motivated by animis towards transgender people and trying to reinforce as sex and gender hierarchy that suggest that there's something normatively preferable about not being transgender.
The government changed its position after President Trump took office, switching to supporting Tennessee's ban. Trump has seemed to target transgender people in various ways, from declaring there are only two sexes to kicking transgender service members out of the military. Why do you think there's so much emphasis on a group that represents less than one percent of the population.
Basically, since it's a little bit after twenty sixteen, it's been a major priority among Republican state legislators, in particular to attack trans right. There's a lot of reasons why that could be the case. You know, one reason that having lost the gay marriage fight, there's an effort to find a different issue that touches on questions of traditional
and non traditional gender and sexual role. The search for another issue became even stronger after Dobbs, after the Supreme Court overturned ro versus Ways, in part because abortions actually quite popular nationally, and so in order to create some kind of coalition that could win national elections, needed to find an issue which would connect to traditional gender and sexual values without touching on something popular like gay marriage
or abortion. So a way to understand the effect of the Trump administration is really that it has accelerated a pre existing tendency, and it's turned what were state level efforts to make transgender life extremely difficult, if not impossible,
into national policy. So the redefinition of sex, attempts to regulate medical treatments, access to bathrooms, access to sports teams, all of those efforts that we saw in the executive orders, and of course, you know, very important restrictions and attempted restrictions now in Congress on access to trans healthcare through various kinds of federal aid are reflecting the nationalization of what had been state level attacks.
Does this decision hurt challenges to attempts to roll back transgender rights.
It might, it might not. As I said, there is not a majority on the Court apparently to hold that anti transiscrimination, you know, is not visible to the Constitution. In other words, there are other kinds of anti transiscrimination that the Court seems to have held open the possibility for recognizing, and so it's going to really depend on
what is characterized as a medical condition. In other words, this opinion says that SB one is discriminating on the basis of gender dysphoria and not transgender identity, and so other laws do not have that character of being ostensibly justified as medical regulations. Instead, I think the normative stakes of just trying to force people not to be transgender
are even clearer in those other situations. And the Court hasn't totally eliminated the possibility of reading those arguments in the future.
And we can expect the court's decision on the use of LGBTQ friendly books in the classroom next week. Thanks so much for joining me. That's Professor Kate Redburn of Columbia Law School. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, Karen Reid is acquitted of the murder of her Boston police officer boyfriend, and a juror is dismissed from the Sean Diddy Combs trial. I'm June Grasso, and you're listening
to Bloomberg. Cheers from hundreds of Karen Reid's supporters outside the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusets as the jury's verdict acquitting her of murder and manslaughter charges was announced on Wednesday. Reid was accused of intentionally ramming her SUV into her Boston police officer boyfriend, John o'keef in a drunken rage after an argument, leaving him to die in a blizzard. The defense had argued that Reid was framed by police, and another jury nearly a year ago was deadlocked after
five days of deliberations, leading to a mistrial. This jury in the retrial, deliberated twenty two hours over four days before reaching its verdict. Only finding reed guilty of drunken driving. A couple of the jurors later said that the police investigation was sloppy, leaving holes in the prosecution's case.
As the weeks passed by, I just realized there was too many holes that we couldn't feel, and there's nothing that put her on the scene in our opinion, besides just dropping. John mcckeffe off.
Thanked her supporters and said this.
No one has fought carter for justice for John O'Keefe.
And I have.
Some of the key prosecution witnesses in the trial released a joint statement calling the not guilty verdict a devastating miscarriage of justice. My guest is former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Ehrenberg. Dave, were you surprised at the acquittal?
I was very surprised by it because I thought the prosecution this time did an excellent job and focusing the jury on the evidence, the data, the cell phone data, the evidence of the battery of the cell phone and when it started to weaken and when the phone started to freeze, the timing. I mean, this was not speculation. Data doesn't have any ax to grind. Data is data. And as a result, I thought the jury would listen
to that. Instead, they got distracted by all the things and apparently found reasonable doubt.
Obviously there were no eyewitness accounts, no direct evidence of the hit, but there were a series of experts to fill in the evidentiary picture. Do you think that testimony was too sophisticated for the jury.
Whenever you get into a battle of experts, it's a problem for prosecution because jurors these days, they want eyewitnesses, they want the DNA, they want the conclusive smoking guns because they're used to seeing that on TV shows which are wrapped up in an hour at BSI and other shows. And if you don't have that, jurors will quickly find some reasonable doubt, especially if it becomes a battle of experts.
But I thought that it was a defense that came up with a cockamamie alternative theory and thus raised the bar for the defense by saying that John O'Keefe entered the home. There's no evidence he entered the home, there's no evidence that anything happened, but he was hit by the car by a drunk, enraged woman who left dozens of angry voicemails on the victim's phone while he lay dying in the snow.
And how did the defense explain Read's own words to paramedics afterwards, repeatedly saying I hit him.
Yeah, her own words. I mean, she admitted it, but they were able to somehow frame it as maybe she was unsure, maybe she thought she did, but the witnesses said no, she said I hit him.
I hit him.
Her own lawyer when this case started said that she did hit him, that this was an accident. But then they changed their view to try to get away with it entirely, and she did.
Would we call it a mixed verdict because they did convict her of operating under the influence of alcohol? Of course, the judge just gave her probation for that.
Well, yeah, but they didn't find her guilty of leaving the scene of an accident, so they didn't even feel that it was conclusive that she caused an accident. So how did he die? It's a binary choice. Either she hit him or he went into the house and was murdered by law enforcement officers and soccer moms who got together in a conspiracy of silence. The murdered their friend and then dump his body on the front lawn. I don't even understand how anyone can think that makes sense.
I mean, if you're a law enforcement officer and you're in cahoots with soccer moms, wouldn't you think you would just claim self defense if you wanted to kill another law enforcement officer, Or wouldn't you try to hide the body? Why would you throw the body onto the front lawns of your house unless it didn't happen, which it didn't happen.
What some people say is the most powerful defense testimony was a snowplow driver who passed the home several times in the hours after the alleged collision and said he didn't see a two hundred and sixteen pounds six foot one man lying in the yard.
Yeah, no one did.
This snow was coming down, and no one did. The only person who found John O'Keefe, who was then the next morning buried under the snow. The only person who found John O'Keefe was the person who hit him, because she knew where his body was. Because she hit him, she knew what happened. No one else could find him. They were driving around looking for him, but she bought them from a while away. Because she's the one who
hit him. So in this case, I feel the same way as I did after the Oj Simpson verdict or the Casey Anthony verdict, that he had a guilty person go free.
Usually on a retrial, it's the prosecution that has the advantage. Why do you think it was different here?
I thought the prosecution did a really good job. I don't have any issues with him. I think the defense was able to capitalize on this content with police, as all it takes his futures would have issues with police. And here the accusation was that there was a police cover up and that the police officers were too close to the family inside the house, and the police officers
were not only incompetent in collecting the evidence. That's the defense talking, not me, but also that the lead investigator, who was not even called to the stand, but that the lead investigator was such discussing individual with his comments about Karen Reid, and he did make offensive comments that the whole thing was tainted. And I think that has some residents of the jury. I think they perhaps want to know why the lead investigator did not testify. Maybe
they were hiding something which they weren't. They just thought that this guy was a side show distraction because of his comments.
Yeah, and the defense seemed to emphasize that in the closing arguments. Did the defense improve over the first trial where it just presented a day and a half of defense witnesses.
I thought the defense did a really good job as they did in the first trial. I mean, anytime you are able to get a guilty client acquitted, it's a real feed for the defense and they deserve credit. They're great lawyers, and it is my belief that she was guilty, and I think the evidence conclusively establishes that. But when you're a defense learning able to create a side show distraction and it works with the jury, then you're doing
your job. That's a shame for the victims' family. That's what it is.
Read, of course, is free of all criminal charges in the case can't be retried, but she still faces a civil wrongful death case by O'Keefe's family, and the standard of proof there is much lower, so she could be held liable for damages there.
Right In a civil case, the standard is just proponents of the evidence. It's much easier to prove and you just have to proved negligence, which is.
A lower burden.
So all around, it's easier to prove that case of the evidence just means, is it more likely than not that Ken Reid did something wrong here committed a tourt. You don't have to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt.
So is the logical conclusion after this verdict that the murderer is still out there?
Yeah? I guess she and Odo Simpson will go search for the real killers. That's really what this is, right, This was a binary choice. Either she hit him with the car or he went inside the house and was murdered by law enforcement officers and soccer mom, and then they threw their friend's body arms of their front law doesn't make any sense.
So, Dave, what do you make of her supporters? I mean, there were crowds of people outside the courthouse waiting for the verdict. I mean why she.
Became a culture personality. I think that the narrative that was fed by bloggers was that here's this sweet innocent woman who's being framed for a crime she didn't commit by the corrupt law enforcement officers. And I just feel for those law enforcement officers and the families for having their names dragged through the mud when they didn't deserve that. They lost a loved one, and John o'keith was a good man. And now, in my mind, a guilty defendant walks free.
When Reid came out of the courthouse, she made this statement that struck me as odd. No one has fought harder for justice for John o'keef than I have.
That's her, oj Simpson, I'm going to find the real killers moment and just tells you all you need to know about her. I mean to make a statement like that, What an install to the family. Now, what an insult? It rubbed salt in the wounds to say something like that. Just go on with your life and this family is suffering enough.
Thanks for being here, Dave. That's day Arenberg, former Palm Beach County State Attorney, and in another high profile trial, jurors may begin deliberating towards the end of next week. Sean Diddy Combs is entrumph for racketeering, conspiracy, and sex trafficking. The prosecution is expected to rest its case on Monday, and the defense says it expects to put on its
case on Wednesday and Thursday. There was some jury drama this week as the judge dismissed a juror, despite the defense raising concerns that putting in a white alternate juror for the black juror would make the jury less diverse. Joining me is former federal prosecutor Robert Mintz, a partner Macarter In English, Bob tell us what happened with Juror number six?
Even before we got to the close of the trial and deliberations in front of the jury, one of the jurors, jur number six, was removed from the panel by the judge after it was determined that the juror had been less than candid about where he resided during the jury
selection process. He apparently indicated that he lived in the Bronx, which is part of the Southern District of New York, the district where the trial is taking place, but later information surfaced that he actually lived with his girlfriend in New Jersey, which is not within the Southern District of New York. And the court will say that you cannot be sitting on the jury unless you reside within the district.
So that was ground to remove the juror, and the judge found that there was nothing that could be done to repair the juror's credibility, since, according to the judge, he had apparently been less than candid about where he was living.
The trial is in its sixth week. Do the attorneys have a feel for which jurors may be leaning in their direction.
Throughout the trial? It's typical for the defense and the prosecution to be forming opinions about which jurors they think
may be favoring their case. Of course, nobody really knows what's going on, but based upon their body language, perhaps based upon the eye contact that they're making with witnesses, eye contact they may be making with a defendant, just the way they conduct themselves in the jury box during the trial, it's inevitable that both the prostitution and the defense formed some belief as the which jurors may be
favoring them as the trial unfold. In this case, when the judge decided that jurors number six had to be removed, there was an objection by the Comb's defense team. This was only one of two black men that was on the panel, and in this case, what you had was the removal of a black, middle aged man who was now replaced by the ultimate who happened to be an
older white man. The defense argued that that was unfair, that it created a racial in the jury, but the judge rule that race is not something that he can consider in terms of removal of jur is something that is beyond the scope of what is relevant for consideration as to whether this juror can continue to sit on the jury panel, and he therefore removes thejur is over the objections of the defense.
This will likely be inn a pellet issue if he's convicted. Thanks Bob. That's Robert Mince of Macarter and English. Coming up next, Shack pays one point eight million dollars to get out of a lawsuit over his FTX endorsements. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg.
Hey's shaquillemun I'm excited to be partnering with FTX to help make crypto accessible for everyone.
I'm all in, are you?
Shack was all in on FTX, endorsing the cryptocurrency exchange along with a host of other celebrities and sports superstars like Tom Brady.
A lot of people big this is how you mind bitcoin. But you don't need a.
Flame doer to buy, sell, or trade bitcoin and crypto safely.
You just need FTX.
Steph Curry, okayryp messing around?
Man, give me some tips from crypto, you know, but you are an expert, right.
No, I'm not an expert and I don't need to be with FTX.
I have everything I need to buy, sell, and trade crypto safely.
And who can forget Larry David Super Bowl commercial.
You might as well put the dishes in the shower.
Hey, Cathin, what's cooking?
We're putting them out on the moon.
Are you out of your mind?
I can't even get tuna without salary. Nobody's going to the moon ever.
But then FTX imploded in twenty twenty two, are raising billions of dollars in customer funds, it's founder Sam Bankman freed convicted of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, and it's celebrity endorsers. We're an obvious target from massive class action lawsuit by investors who sued them for promoting FTX as a trustworthy platform and allegedly enabling FTX to engage in fraud.
Shaquille O'Neil is no longer all in on FTX. In fact, he's the first celebrity who's decided to take himself out of the equation, walking away from the case by agreeing to pay one point eight million dollars to settle. Joining me is entertainment attorney Ron Beanstock, a partner at Scarinsey Hollinbeck. Ron tell us about the lawsuits filed against FTX celebrity endorsers, including Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Gisel Bunchen, Naomi Osaka, David Ortiz, and Larry David.
So let me begin by explaining. If you can imagine putting a frozen dinner into the microwave and it explodes and gets onto everybody and everything. That's what's happened here. So we have to go back a couple of years. Sam Bankman, Freed and other people decide that they want to create a cryptocurrency exchange, right they want to compete with other well known cryptocurrency exchanges of a Haamian based company.
Hintin that should has already told somebody something and FTX gets formed with investment capital and to create the largest if you will, but also the rabatas of it being serious. Who do we turn to return to media people, sports figures, celebrities to if you will become ambassadors. You can't see my hands, but hand quotes in the air, ambassadors for the brand, and in return people would get either shares
or get paid. So Tom Brady gets fifty five million dollars in stock and is now ex wife Giselle Bundes gets nineteen point eight. The problem with all of that is is that this is not true normal endorsement degree. You know, if you're endorsing a product Breakfast Cereal, Wheaty's Box, right, the chances of things going wrong with the product itself
are fairly minimalized. These are gems products. Once you get to services like this, where you've got a currency exchange service that you're telling people and this is the quote from the complaint is safe and reliable. I think that there's going to be an issue whether you were fully advised both by the ambassador of this serves or even your own people advising you as the ambassador, as the
potential downfalls and pitfalls of this. So it starts with FTX rolling along becoming this sort of high investment package group. They get naming rights to a sports stadium in Miami. They sponsor a Formula One racing team all of the big money looking type things to show look how well we're doing, and then they don't make any money, and investors file in the Southern District of Florida in Federal Core.
Obviously there's a now consolidated case. It's a five hundred page complaint that lays out that we as investors have been defrauded and that money went into this morass and did not come back out as profit for us, and you promised to profit on this unregulated cryptocurrency exchange.
So there's a.
Series of interlocking lawsuits and complaints all taking place at the same time. Well, what occurs bankruptcy and from that bankruptcy things just fall down the hill so fast.
Explain Shaq's involvement.
We don't know the inside story, but Shaq, along with Larry David, Naomi Osaka, Steph Curry, and Shohiotani are all involved. They all get paid. Now, this is not sort of your classic influencer deal. They're paid ambassadors of this and they put their own personal brand at stake by doing this.
Shaq gets paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be an ambassador for the FTX and people are giving money in based upon the assurances that these really well known people, and Shack has reputation of being a very good business person, that they are sure that there'll be some successful outcome of this doesn't happen, goes into bankruptcy. So the lawsuits begin back in that consolidated case in Florida, and there's a serious emotions back and forth, and Shack
opts out. He settles, and there is a judge's orders as to whether liability we expanded or curtailed involving mister Brady and all these other people. And Shack settled prior to the judge's order. And he settles for one point eight million and a release. And everybody's been saying, well, did he opt out too soon? I think that's a
fair question. I think he opted out for a cap amount and a release, and he could walk away from this, even though this agreement still needs to be approved by the court, that at this point it looks like he'll get out for one point eight where just all the money he got plus another nearly a million dollars.
Decades ago, the Ninth Circuit found that Steve Garvey, the star baseball player, couldn't be held liable for endorsing a weight loss system that claimed people could lose wait just by sitting around and doing nothing because he didn't know about material representations. So have celebrity endorsers generally not been found liable for the wrongful acts of the companies whose products they promote.
It's the perfect question. The general follow is if you had a product and the product hurts somebody or something happens, you're generally indemnified. Right, I promoted the product, but you indemnified me if someone got hurt with the product. Here the harm was so substantial involving services that the harm can't even be calculated to some extent. But the general rule to follow is when you're an endorser of a product,
you're generally capped. Generally think they're indemnified. You know, it's pretty straightforward.
These thinks.
They're done all the time. This is an unregulated business. And I've got to toss in one more thing. Shack had already been involved in an NFT promotion for those not familiar, non fungible token that he and his son started, and he settled for eleven million dollars. It was called the Astros project, and he settled late last year he was promoting it and he was one of the major figures in it, and he settled the class action for
eleven million. Again an unregulated business. NFT's with this flash and of pan as we've all talked about, and then it's gone. It has no value, right the cryptocurrency exchanged world with SDX fell apart, no value. So the answer to that question is there are limitations as to major endorsement agreements with regulated business, food, beverages, things of that nature. But in the unregulated world. This is where I can't make a flag red and big enough to waive to people to say, are you sure?
What will the plaintiff investors have to show here that they relied on the celebrity endorser. And it's one thing to rely on a celebrities endors to buy beer or chips or face cream, But how reasonable is it to rely on a celebrities endorsement to invest your money? Does that matter?
People have relied on celebrity endorsements for many decades. Think about it, cigarettes, that's an unsafe product. People have done car endorsements and there've been car crashes. So the difference is is that it's relatively regulated. You do have FBA, you would have you know, transportation issues, you've got regulations to some extent. There's oversight here, and when there's no oversight,
I think that's the biggest question. What happens with non regulated oversight business where of course this is the big money, right, there's no end to it. People see pie in the sky. There's the lure of the unregulated billions. It captures people, including investors. And the complaint, like I said, stated that the ambassadors are claiming it's safe and reliable, but the
complaint also says they knew the risks. Soquestion is shouldn't that same theory been imputed to the investor's sophisticated money people who would have known the risks of investing in a cryptocurrency exchange. And I think that's the question that we don't have the answer to. We will have it from the court to some extent, and we'll see how successful the claims go against the various people I mentioned before, Otani,
David Osaka Curry the liability extent to them. But Shack got out because he saw a moment to cap it. And I think his attorneys may have had a relationship with Plank discouncil, and they may have known each other, and they're probably a little back door, you know, behind the scenes trading, and he got out for one point eight.
As you mentioned before, a Florida federal judge dismissed a lot of the claims against the celebrities in the case, narrowing the scope of the litigation.
He dismissed some of the potential liability aspects of it. And again we don't really know. The voluminous paperwork on this case is hard to explain. Like I said, complaint alone and men to complaint to five hundred pages and who knows can make it a third emend There are so many decisions to have been made involving the motions to dismiss back and forth. But at some point there was probably a series of claims here that the judge is going to feel, you know what, I'm going to
curtail this. I want to get the case back under control. It's too broad, So I'm going to allow some of this liability to come through, and I think I'm going to dismiss other aspects of it.
Do you see these lawsuits affecting celebrity endorsement deals in the future.
I think so I think this is going to have some chilling effect.
I do.
And for you to be in a position you the average you know, superstar person, media celebrity, to be in a position where you can settle for one point eight million or in Shack's case, eleven million and then one point eight million, I suppose if you've got that liquidity to do that, then maybe things don't bother you. And maybe at that level of finance, you know, access to capital,
maybe it doesn't. But I think it's going to have a chilling effect, and I would hope so on people making decisions, particularly in unregulated businesses like NFT, cryptocurrency exchange, Bitcoin which is a form of cryptocurrency, and other mean
coins and think of this nature. I think that's where people are going to start to get a little bit more reluctant to lend their name to something, because now you're talking about your brand being damaged to support another brand, and we only have the one brand, and when it's tarnished, your ability to endorse high level things will diminish.
We'll see if any other celebrities decide to take the settlement route like Shack. Thanks so much, Ron, that's Ron Beanstock a partner at Scarincy Holland Beck. And that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot bloomberg dot com, slash podcast slash Law, And remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every
weeknight at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg