Ladies and gentlemen, they got him. A historic day—mark it on your calendar for all time: Sunday afternoon, process servers finally cornered Shaquille O'Neal outside of his residence in Atlanta and forced him to accept transmission of documents related to a class-action lawsuit filed way back in November 2022. After months spent unsuccessfully hounding his various properties, after a failed motion to have a Florida court adopt a Texas legal standard that would permit plaintiffs to serve O'Neal electronically by sliding into his direct messages, after lawyers resorted to quite literally tweet-shaming O'Neal from the parking lot in front of the TNT studio where he films live episodes of Inside the NBA, at last a process server was able to physically pass documents into O'Neal's enormous hands, bringing to a close this months-long saga.
As reported by The Block, plaintiff's attorney Adam Moskowitz confirmed that the "end of this silly sideshow" was captured on video on the doorstep of O'Neal's Atlanta home. “We just served personally Shaquille O’Neal outside his house with a copy of our complaint at 4pm,” Moskowitz told The Block in an email. “His home video cameras recorded our service and we have made it very clear, he is not to destroy and/or erase any of these security tapes, because they must be preserved for our lawsuit."
O'Neal is now formally engaged in the complaint, and will eventually be required to appear in federal court. According to the extremely desperate tweets last week from Moskowitz's law firm, O'Neal was the last of the "FTX celebrities"—a group which, depending upon how you feel about Udonis Haslem's claims to fame, features up to nine other paid FTX spokespeople—to agree to receive his legal complaint. The group includes Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen, Larry David, Shohei Ohtani, Trevor Lawrence, Stephen Curry, David Ortiz, and Naomi Osaka, and all are accused of using their fame to lure unsuspecting retail investors into investing in Sam Bankman-Fried's "Deceptive FTX Platform." FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange closely associated with a Bankman-Fried-run crypto-hedge fund, went kerblooey in November after CoinDesk research showed that a whopping $5.8 billion of FTX's "assets" were in the form of its own worthless, imaginary coin/security called FTT. O'Neal, who famously will endorse just about anything at any time, endorsed FTX in a video posted online in June 2022.
