A Motion to Intervene has been filed in the WP Engine lawsuit against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, alleging fifteen claims and seeking monetary awards along with changes to WordPress.org’s governance structure.
A motion to intervene is a legal request by a third party that seeks to join an ongoing lawsuit, the success of which hinges on proving that they have a significant interest in the outcome of a case.
Legal Filing Seeks To Take Control Of WordPress
Among the requests made in the legal filing is one that compels Matt Mullenweg to create a WordPress Oversight Board to oversee the governance of the WordPress Foundation, WordPress.org and other related entities.
“D. Order Defendant Matt Mullenweg to establish a Governance Oversight Board as defined in the Proposed Order For Contempt filed by Michael Willman;”
Moderator Of WPDrama Subreddit
The person filing the court motion is a WordPress web developer and a moderator of the r/WPDrama subreddit named Michael Willman (LinkedIn profile), CEO of Redev, a WordPress development and SEO company, who alleges that Mullenweg banned him, which caused him to lose two clients and a significant amount of earnings because of those losses.
Willman contacted Search Engine Journal about the legal filing and offered a background explanation of what happened:
“Near the start of this dispute, I lost a large ($14,500) contract as a direct result of being banned by Matt along with everyone else loosely associated. We had just closed the contract mere days before and the client is just seeing all these stories, and they back out. Losing that revenue would eventually make us unable to serve our largest client at the time, and we lost them too.
I took this all personally, and I tried to take to his #ranting channel on Slack to respond to his inane blog posts and share how his actions had damaged me and got me to the point of being ready to sue him as well.
He then banned me in retaliation for that and afterwards claimed a message saying I was going to go to Houston to file other legal documents was a “physical threat.”
He has a long history of inconsistent application of the Code of Conduct and I don’t think he can show that his actions here were justified, my own reading of the Code of Conduct implies that some type of warning in private is the first step. “
That last part about the allegedly false claim that he made a physical threat against Matt Mullenweg is now a part of the new motion.
Post On Reddit
Mr. Willman posted about his motion on Reddit, saying that he will donate 5% of any monetary awards to WordPress.
Members of the Reddit WordPress community were supportive, with one member named JonOlds posting:
“A client backing out of a signed contract ($14,500) because you being banned created a significant change is the most clear-cut example of harm from the WPE bans that I’ve seen so far. Fuck MM, and I really hope this is granted.”
Another person wrote: