A hearing on Chris Principe's harassment injunction motion won't happen on December 1st as scheduled. Both sides asked the court on November 16th to push it back to December 22nd.

They claim they're not stalling. Instead, they say they've been negotiating and might reach a settlement that lets Principe withdraw the motion entirely or parts of it. Lawyers on both sides believe they can work out a compromise on the relief Principe is seeking. What they've discussed remains sealed.

Principe filed his reply to Timothy Curry's response on November 17th, and his attorney made some aggressive arguments. An injunction wouldn't violate Curry's free speech rights, the filing claims. Social media posts aren't protected public speech. Principe isn't a public figure. OneCoin being a Ponzi scheme and Principe's promotion of it doesn't matter to the public interest. And if the injunction is granted, Curry can still discuss OneCoin.

One claim stands out as particularly questionable.

Principe's attorney argues there's no evidence Principe voluntarily inserted himself into any public controversy. Curry provided no admissible proof of this, the filing states. The only undisputed fact is that Principe's magazine, Financial IT, put OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova on its February 2016 cover with an article. Since no OneCoin controversy existed when that article published, Principe can't be accused of jumping into a controversy he created.

Except that's not quite accurate.

BehindMLM published its OneCoin review on September 23rd, 2014. That article now has over 1,372 comments and well over a hundred thousand views. Between September 2014 and February 2016, seventeen months passed. During that stretch, BehindMLM alone ran forty articles documenting OneCoin's Ponzi scheme. Four regulatory bodies issued warnings: Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, and Hungary. OneCoin cancelled its US launch over fears of a regulatory probe into the scheme.

By February 2016, calling OneCoin uncontroversial requires ignoring a year and a half of global regulatory action and widespread reporting. The company's own scrapped American launch happened months before Principe's magazine featured Ignatova.

Principle's legal team also claims Curry hasn't provided admissible evidence of Principe's continued OneCoin promotion. That's a technical argument about what counts in court, but it sidesteps the substance: Principe's magazine gave prominent coverage to the head of an operation already under international scrutiny for operating as a pyramid scheme.

The December 22nd hearing date gives both sides time to negotiate a settlement. Whether they reach one depends on whether they can agree on what "compromise" actually means when one side is arguing a well-documented international fraud scheme wasn't controversial when they covered it.

🤖 Quick Answer

Why was Chris Principe's harassment injunction hearing postponed?
The hearing scheduled for December 1st was delayed to December 22nd following a joint request from both parties on November 16th. The attorneys claim ongoing settlement negotiations could result in Principe withdrawing the motion entirely or partially, potentially reaching a compromise on the relief sought.

What legal arguments did Principe present in his November 17th filing?
Principe's attorneys argued that an injunction would not violate Timothy Curry's free speech rights, contending that social media posts do not constitute protected public speech. The filing further asserts that Principe is not a public figure under relevant legal standards.

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