Craig Wright Cleared Of All Charges But One, Ordered To Pay $100M
Years long legal battle Kleiman v. Wright has come to an end. Craig Wright and his defense team won on all claims except one count of conversion. The jury ruled against Wright on the conversion count, awarding $100 million to Kleiman and Wright’s shared business, W&K Info Defense Research.
A federal jury found that Craig Wright, the Australian who claims to have invented Bitcoin, didn’t have a business partnership with deceased Florida computer forensics expert Dave Kleiman, but he does owe $100 million in compensatory damages for conversion to a company Kleiman founded in Florida, W&K Info Defense Research.
Wright commented the verdict:
“I feel remarkably happy and vindicated. I am not a fraud, and I never have been.”
He added that he had offered Kleiman’s estate, represented by Dave’s brother Ira Kleiman, “12 million [dollars] many years ago, which if he had taken that then in bitcoin, when bitcoin was $200, and he kept it – you can do the math.”
The plaintiffs, the Kleiman estate, accused Wright of manipulating his former business partner Dave Kleiman’s bitcoin inheritance and IP. The lawsuit’s preliminaries and discovery period dragged on for years, with a lot of mystery in between.
Wright has been locked in a legal battle with the estate of his deceased partner since 2018. The Kleiman estate claimed Wright fraudulently attempted to seize David Kleiman’s share of bitcoins and intellectual property incurred during an alleged business partnership between the two. One such venture included the alleged creation of Bitcoin, with Wright saying that he himself is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Though considerable evidence has cast doubt on these claims, including a number of forged documents uncovered as part of this legal dispute, today’s judgment does mean the Court recognized Wright as the sole creator behind the Satoshi Nakamoto project. However, whether Wright actually is Satoshi was not a debated question of the case. Rather, the case assumed Wright had invented Bitcoin, and instead asked whether Kleiman and Wright were partners together behind the invention of Bitcoin or just Wright alone.
Wright commented on a video:
“Next, there are still more fights. Were going to make everything change… cryptocurrency to digital cash the way its meant to be. My original invention is coming back. I’m not going anywhere, I’m here for the long term and I’m here for the fight.”
Ira Kleiman wasn’t in the courtroom but told CoinDesk last week:
“I’m depressed. We thought they would return a favorable verdict in a day.”
Ira Kleiman, has largely avoided the press, while Wright has a host of supporters who are active online. Feeling that his side of the story had been drowned out, Ira Kleiman added a section to the website DaveKleiman.com highlighting details from exhibits in his court case that he hoped readers would see.
That included emails Craig Wright wrote to various people, saying things like, “Dave Kleiman and I started mining in 2009. So we have a few things that will interest them. It is a shame Dave died last year before fruition, but all is moving ahead”; “I was not the person doing the mining. Dave was.”; and “Satoshi was a team. Without the other part of the team, he died.”
Ira Kleiman was frustrated that given such pronouncements, the jury hadn’t easily found in his favor.
His own lawyers, however, had spent much of the trial insisting that Wright forged and backdated documents – a position backed up by a magistrate judge overseeing the case before the trial began in November.
In August 2019, Bruce Reinhart, the judge, issued a sanctions order against Wright, stating:
“The evidence establishes that he has engaged in a willful and bad faith pattern of obstructive behavior, including submitting incomplete or deceptive pleadings, filing a false declaration, knowingly producing a fraudulent trust document, and giving perjurious testimony at the evidentiary hearing.”
The sanctions order was vacated by U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, the presiding judge, before the trial began.
Wright’s defense team accused plaintiffs of “cherry-picking,” presenting the documents that fit their narrative as legitimate and others as forged.
It was clear the jurors were uncomfortable making decisions in the case. On Wednesday they said they couldn’t agree on any of the counts, but Bloom directed them to continue deliberating.
