Suits and Litigation (Civil)

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      Ashwin Deshmukh Knew How to Win Friends and Hustle People

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      Sometimes, you meet someone in New York who gives you a good feeling and a bad feeling at the same time. Maybe you’re introduced at a bar, through a friend of a friend. This person is charming and full of ideas, ideas that resonate with you. He seems to know everyone you know, and some other people you follow only on social media. You like him, even though you wonder whether he’s for real. He has a story about the city and his place in it, a story in which he may invite you to play a role. This is tempting. You get the sense that he has a momentum unlike other people’s, toward a destination that could be glamorous — or maybe catastrophic.One such person is Ashwin Deshmukh, the 38-year-old managing partner of Superiority Burger, one of the most acclaimed restaurants in New York.Since reopening last April, the high-low vegetarian diner in the East Village has garnered a three-star review from The New York Times, a James Beard Award nomination, and the title, bestowed by GQ magazine, of “Buzziest Restaurant in America.” That it took over the space once occupied by the venerable Odessa Restaurant, saving the neighborhood from yet another Duane Reade or Capital One, has made it only more beloved.But June Kwan, the owner of the East Village Sichuan restaurant Spicy Moon, does not love Superiority Burger — or at least, the people behind the restaurant. In February, she sued them twice. The first suit asserts that since 2021, when Ms. Kwan invested a quarter of a million dollars in Superiority Burger through Mr. Deshmukh, the business has gone dark, refusing to send her proof of her equity, and eventually ignoring her altogether. The second suit alleges that in 2022, Ms. Kwan lent $200,000 to Mr. Deshmukh, and that he hasn’t repaid a penny.Text messages attached to the suits capture the breakdown of Mr. Deshmukh’s relationship with Ms. Kwan, a Taiwanese immigrant who started her business in middle age. Ahead of Ms. Kwan’s initial investment, Mr. Deshmukh wrote to her that “I am so confident in this and our friendship that I am happy to personally guarantee your investment on a five-year basis.”In October 2022, after a month of asking Mr. Deshmukh to repay the loan in increasingly desperate terms, Ms. Kwan wrote: “I have supported you with my full heart, but now you don’t pay me back the money and don’t update what happened to sb when I’m a shareholder. I don’t sleep well because of this.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pet Shop That Sold Sick and Hurt Puppies Will Repay Nearly 200 Customers

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      Shake A Paw agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general after investigators found that the Long Island business was selling puppies from so-called puppy mills.The owners of a Long Island pet store accused of knowingly selling hundreds of sick and injured puppies, including some that died days after being bought, will pay $300,000 to about 200 customers under a settlement announced by New York’s attorney general on Friday.The settlement resolves a lawsuit filed by the attorney general, Letitia James, in December 2021 after an investigation by her office determined that the store, Shake A Paw, was acquiring and selling puppies from so-called puppy mills, large-scale commercial breeders with reputations for abuse, inbreeding and filthy conditions.Ms. James’s inquiry also found that the store and its owners, Marc Jacobs and Gerard O’Sullivan, had failed to disclose animals’ serious medical conditions and had illegally refused to reimburse customers for veterinary bills incurred after they had been sold sick pets, according to court documents.In addition to repaying the $300,000, Mr. Jacobs and Mr. O’Sullivan agreed to stop misleading advertising including claims that puppies sold by Shake A Paw were the “healthiest” and from the “most trusted breeders”; to buy animals only from reputable breeders; and to provide customers with disclosures certifying the health of their puppies, according to court documents.All pet stores in New York will be prohibited from selling dogs, cats and rabbits starting in December under a law passed in 2022.Richard Hamburger, a lawyer for Shake A Paw, declined to comment late Friday. Erin Laxton, who bought her Chihuahua-dachshund mix, Merlin, at Shake A Paw in 2020, described the settlement as a “huge relief.” Ms. Laxton said Merlin had begun coughing the day she brought him home from Shake A Paw and had died of respiratory illnesses five weeks later, according to court documents.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Racial Profiling in Japan Is Prevalent but Unseen, Some Residents Say

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      Experts say the country’s first lawsuit about police discrimination against foreign-born residents highlights a systematic problem.It’s not that there is anything bad about your hair, the police officer politely explained to the young Black man as commuters streamed past in Tokyo Station. It’s just that, based on his experience, people with dreadlocks were more likely to possess drugs.Alonzo Omotegawa’s video of his 2021 stop and search led to debates about racial profiling in Japan and an internal review by the police. For him, though, it was part of a perennial problem that began when he was first questioned as a 13-year-old.“In their mind, they’re just doing their job,” said Mr. Omotegawa, 28, an English teacher who is half-Japanese and half-Bahamian, born and raised in Japan.“I’m like as Japanese as it comes, just a bit tan,” he added. “Not every Black person is going to have drugs.”Racial profiling is emerging as a flashpoint in Japan as increasing numbers of migrant workers, foreign residents and mixed-race Japanese change the country’s traditionally homogenous society and test deep-seated suspicion toward outsiders.With one of the world’s oldest populations and a stubbornly low birthrate, Japan has been forced to rethink its restrictive immigration policies. And as record numbers of migrant workers arrive in the country, many of the people tidying up hotel rooms, working the register at convenience stores or flipping burgers are from places like Vietnam, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Big Questions Raised by Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI

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      Experts say the case against the start-up and its chief executive, Sam Altman, raises unusual legal issues that do not have a clear precedent.From Silicon Valley to Wall Street to Washington, the blockbuster case that Elon Musk filed against OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, has become Topic A. It is the business world’s hottest soap opera.But among lawyers, the case has become something of a fascination for a different reason: It poses a series of unique and unusual legal questions without clear precedent. And it remains unclear what would constitute “winning” in a case like this, given that it appears to have been brought out of Musk’s own personal frustration and philosophical differences with Open A.I, a company he helped found and then left.The lawsuit — which pits one of the wealthiest men in the world against the most advanced A.I. company in the world, backed by Microsoft, one the world’s most valuable companies — argues that OpenAI, a nonprofit organization that created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, breached a contract to operate in the public interest and violated its duties by diverting from its founding purpose of benefiting humanity.Musk’s lawyers — led by Morgan Chu, a partner at Irell & Manella who is known as the “$5 billion man” for his win record — want the court to force OpenAI to open its technology to others and to stop licensing it to Microsoft, which has invested billions in its partnership with the start-up.Among the questions that lawyers and scholars are asking after poring through Musk’s 35-page complaint:Does Musk even have standing to sue? “One of the differences with nonprofits compared to other companies is that, generally, no one other than the state attorney general has standing to sue for the kind of stuff that he’s complaining about, like not following your mission,“ Peter Molk, a professor of law at the University of Florida, said of Musk’s lawsuit. That’s most likely why Musk’s lawyers are presenting the case as a breach of contract instead of attacking the company’s nonprofit status.Musk also alleges that OpenAI has breached its fiduciary duty, but that charge has its own challenges, lawyers said, given that such claims are traditionally handled in Delaware, not California, where the lawsuit was filed. (Musk, of course, has an infamously rocky relationship with the state of Delaware.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk’s Feud With OpenAI Goes to Court

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      The tech mogul wants to force the A.I. start-up to reveal its research to the public and prevent it from pursuing profits.Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, has escalated his feud with OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersMusk takes aim at OpenAI The gloves have really come off in one of the most personal fights in the tech world: Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, accusing them of reneging on the start-up’s original purpose of being a nonprofit laboratory for the technology.Yes, Musk has disagreed with Altman for years about the purpose of the organization they co-founded and he is creating a rival artificial intelligence company. But the lawsuit also appears rooted in philosophical differences that go to the heart of who controls a hugely transformative technology — and is backed by one of the wealthiest men on the planet.The backstory: Musk, Altman and others agreed to create OpenAI in 2015 to provide an open-sourced alternative to the likes of Google, which had bought the leading A.I. start-up DeepMind the year before. Musk notes in his suit that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation states that its work “will benefit the public,” and that it isn’t “organized for the private gain of any person.”Musk poured more than $44 million into OpenAI between 2016 and 2020, and helped hire top talent like the researcher Ilya Sutskever.Altman has moved OpenAI toward commerce, starting with the creation in 2019 of a for-profit subsidiary that would raise money from investors, notably Microsoft. The final straw for Musk came last year, when OpenAI released its GPT-4 A.I. model — but kept its workings hidden from all except itself and Microsoft.“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers write in the complaint.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ferguson, Mo., Agrees to Pay $4.5 Million to Settle ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Suit

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      A federal judge gave the settlement preliminarily approval nearly a decade after a class-action lawsuit accused the city of wrongfully jailing plaintiffs for traffic tickets and other minor offenses.The City of Ferguson, Mo., has agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit that accused it of violating the constitutional rights of thousands of people who said they were jailed without due process because they could not pay fines.The lawsuit was filed in 2015 amid protests over the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white Ferguson police officer. It accused the city of jailing the plaintiffs in “deplorable” conditions simply because they could not pay debts owed for traffic tickets or other minor offenses.“They were threatened, abused, and left to languish in confinement,” lawyers for the plaintiffs argued in the suit, noting that these conditions lasted until families could produce enough cash for bail, or until jail officials decided to let them out.On Tuesday, ArchCity Defenders, the nonprofit group in St. Louis that filed the suit, said in a statement that checks would be sent to more than 15,000 people who were jailed by the city between Feb. 8, 2010, and Dec. 30, 2022, and that the amount would depend on the number of hours each of them had spent in jail.David Musgrave, Ferguson’s assistant city manager, said in an email on Thursday that the city would not comment “while the settlement agreement is pending final approval by the Court.”Mr. Musgrave directed further questions to the city’s lawyers, one of whom, Apollo Carey, declined to comment. Another lawyer did not immediately respond to an email and call. Neither the mayor nor the Ferguson Police Department could be reached for comment on Thursday evening.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Instagram and Facebook Subscriptions Are a New Focus of Child Safety Suit

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      New Mexico’s attorney general has accused Meta of not protecting children from sexual predators on its platforms. He now wants to know how it polices subscribers to accounts featuring children.The New Mexico attorney general, who last year sued Meta alleging that it did not protect children from sexual predators and had made false claims about its platforms’ safety, announced Monday that his office would examine how the company’s paid-subscription services attract predators.Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he had formally requested documentation from the social media company about subscriptions on Facebook and Instagram, which are frequently available on children’s accounts run by parents.Instagram does not allow users under 13, but accounts that focus entirely on children are permitted as long as they are managed by an adult. The New York Times published an investigation on Thursday into girl influencers on the platform, reporting that the so-called mom-run accounts charge followers up to $19.99 a month for additional photos as well as chat sessions and other extras.The Times found that adult men subscribe to the accounts, including some who actively participate in forums where people discuss the girls in sexual terms.“This deeply disturbing pattern of conduct puts children at risk — and persists despite a wave of lawsuits and congressional investigations,” Mr. Torrez said in a statement.Mr. Torrez filed a complaint in December that accused Meta of enabling harmful activity between adults and minors on Facebook and Instagram and failing to detect and remove such activity when it was reported. The allegations were based, in part, on findings from accounts Mr. Torrez’s office created, including one for a fictitious 14-year-old girl that received an offer of $180,000 to appear in a pornographic video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More