If Mark Zuckerberg thought he had seen the last of the Winklevoss twins, he has another think coming. A day after Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss gave up on taking one lawsuit against the Facebook founder to the U.S. Supreme Court, they ratcheted up their efforts in a separate one.
The Winklevoss twins and their business partner Divya Narendra filed a status report in a Massachusetts federal court Thursday saying they were pursuing discovery in a lawsuit that alleges that Facebook intentionally suppressed evidence during the trio's 2008 settlement proceedings with Zuckerberg, according to media reports.
Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, both former Olympic rowers, claim Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook while the four were students at Harvard. The twins received $65 million in the 2008 settlement that was featured prominently in the film The Social Network, though that the dollar value of their settelment may be considerably higher today because $45 million of it was conferred in Facebook shares that are worth more than four times what they were back then.
The Massachusetts case concerns the twins' and Narendra's claim that some instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during the Harvard period when he was first building the social networking website that would become Facebook should have been disclosed during the 2008 settlement process.
Those IMs allegedly "shed new light" on the twins' business relationship with Zuckerberg in those early days of Facebook.
On Wednesday, the plaintiffs pulled the plug on a separate lawsuit in a Ninth Circuit appeals court in San Francisco that concerned their claim that Facebook wasn't up front about its internal valuation during those proceedings.
Facebook responded to the new filing in Massachusetts with a curt dismissal.
"These are old and baseless allegations that have been considered and rejected previously by the courts," the company's outside counsel Neel Chatterjee told The Wall Street Journal.